[Zope] XML-RPC and region-specific characters

I'm stuck on a problem with our production site (in the UK) We have a client application sending data to a Zope server by XML-RPC. Our users have been trying to send text descriptions including the British Pound symbol £. But this not being sent or received correctly. Has anyone found this problem with £, or any other region-specific characters. I have read that it's possible to use XML-RPC with unicode, but have been unable to find exactly how to do this with Zope. Can anyone offer any help?