FEATURES Good morning I
f you came across it flicking through the stations on your digital radio, Alan ‘Dusty’ Miller’s breakfast mix of chart pop, news highlights and
chirpy banter wouldn’t seem too unusual. But listen closer and you realise his show is unlike anything else on UK radio.
This morning’s competition winners were from Iraq. The news highlights the opening of a school, built by British soldiers, in a remote part of Afghanistan. The weather forecast predicts another day of blazing sunshine, with highs of 48 degrees.
On the other side of the soundproof window in Miller’s studio, the view is not of a British city but of blast-protective walls built out of concrete, sandbags and wire mesh. Above them he can see military helicopters taking off and landing from their flight line adjacent to the station’s single-storey prefab building.
Miller’s live broadcast forms part of some forty hours of programming made every week at Camp Bastion, the British military base occupying an area the size of Middlesbrough in the middle of a desert in Helmand Province, Afghanistan. His Ops Breakfast show is heard wherever British Service personnel are based – from Cyprus to the Falkland Islands, Germany to Kuwait, to Royal Navy warships at sea – as well as on DAB across the UK and online.
Like the camp, which has a post office, a fire station and even a pizza delivery service, the show is an attempt to provide an anchoring touch of normality in the heart of a war zone. It’s greatly valued at Bastion, but even more so in the smaller patrol bases where there’s no electricity, never mind phones or internet access, and radio often provides the only connection with home.
In an era of iPods and Spotify, where personal playlists have supplanted the communality
of broadcast media, Miller’s show – and the British Forces Broadcasting Service network that carries it – proves that radio’s ability to
Afghanistan!
It’s breakfast radio, but not as we know it – at Camp Bastion studios, an alarm warns DJs when to play a tape and then dive for cover. Angus Batey reports
unite listeners across time zones and borders remains undiminished.
“Wherever you go, from Camp Bastion to the most humble of patrol bases, the radio’s on and people are listening,” says Paul Wright, BFBS’s station manager at Bastion. “Over the years, British forces have been deployed all around the world, and the one thing that’s kept them in touch with home and with the sense of being British, and kept them away from that complete isolation of being in a very alien environment, is forces radio.”
Miller, BFBS’s longest-serving presenter with more than thirty years on the network, adds: “Effectively, what we’re contracted to do is to provide that link – that little bit of Britain. It’s the sort of English-speaking radio service that I would expect to get if I was in Birmingham, Liverpool or wherever, but here I am in the middle of Afghanistan, and I can listen to Tottenham Hotspur in the Premiership. It’s that little bit of home, if you like, that brings the troops a bit closer.”
From its beginnings as a single radio station broadcasting out of Algiers in 1943, BFBS has grown to such an extent that it now delivers a range of independently generated and third- party radio and TV programming to British forces personnel across the globe. Through deals with BBC, ITV, Sky and others, BFBS’s TV channels carry soaps, news, movies and live sport to the larger bases, where military personnel can watch on screens in coffee bars and dining halls, or via USB receivers on their laptops.
Although it used to be part of the Ministry of Defence, BFBS was spun off in the 80s and re-established as a charity. Its only donor is the MoD, which sets the terms of the contract under which it broadcasts, but it is editorially independent – sometimes to the chagrin of Whitehall.
BFBS would love to hear from you with your Christmas messages. “We are live on Xmas Day from Afghanistan and would encourage families to get in touch through our website
bfbs.com/messages or email
ops@bfbs.com or through their iPhone as we have a new BFBS radio App downloadable through itunes free of charge”.
10 Envoy Winter 2011
www.raf-ff.org.uk
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