bernk - 5:35 pm on Apr 7, 2009 (gmt 0)

The problem was indeed caused by the server having a default charset of ISO-8859-1. It was easily rectified using an .htaccess file with the following line:

AddDefaultCharset OFF


I hope this helps someone in the future. I should also point out that you should have the charset specified in each of your files if you are going to use AddDefaultCharset OFF. If you do not have a charset specified in each file you can use UTF-8 (or any other charset) instead of OFF.