[TYPO3] Special Characters display issue

[Tony Lush]

HTML entities are not displaying on the web page using UTF-8 when the page 
content type is: 

meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8"

but can be made to display if I change the page content type to

meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1"

The database character set is  UTF-8 Unicode and the collation is 
itf8_general_ci. In TYPO3 both BE and FE are set to UTF-8

I had presumed that the page content type should be UTF-8, since we will 
later add several more languages to the site. 

Is there a way for the special characters to display correctly when using the 
UTF-8 character set?

Thank you -- Tony Lush