If 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 48C.
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 40 hours of programming made every week at Camp Bastion, a 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 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 30 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 soldiers 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's staff are civilians, and the company is run from the UK. But it has outposts all over the world, and its staff deploy on operations, just like their audience. Before beginning broadcasts from Bastion, in October 2009, Miller, Wright and their colleagues were on a British base in Iraq, where they slept in steel-reinforced bunks nicknamed "coffins", and a silent alarm would illuminate during live shows to advise them when to switch to a tape and take cover from incoming rocket attacks.
"We're not a civilian station, acting independent of the operational theatre – we are an integral part of what this operation's about," Miller says. "We're all in it together, really – and to a certain extent, I think that's how the military view us. They arrive, and, nine times out of 10, BFBS are already here. They come here, they switch the radio on, and they go, 'Oh – we're alright, BFBS are here. We'll have our telly, we'll have our radio, we'll be able to say hi to the wives, and more importantly the wives will be able to say hi to us.' The wife gets up in the morning, switches on the radio, and if she's got DAB and she's listening to BFBS, she knows her husband is listening to exactly what she's listening to. Just by telling them, 'It's hot, the weather's clear blue skies and 45 degrees,' they can picture what their husband's doing. It's important stuff. And that's how our programming is actually designed."
This difference in approach is reflected in every aspect of BFBS's output, but not least in the music it plays. "Our listener could be an 18-year-old squaddie just joined, or a 55-year-old sergeant major about to retire," Miller says. "The established, marketing-driven mechanisms in UK broadcasting don't really work for us at all."
The backbone of BFBS's playlist is Forces 500, a list of tracks voted for by their audience. It leans heavily towards classic rock – Queen's Bohemian Rhapsody is No 1, while Sweet Child O' Mine, Wonderwall and Summer of 69 are all in the Top 10 – but it includes hits that span decades and genres. Another vote was taken among soldiers in theatre to choose the first song played when BFBS began its live broadcasts from Bastion and the winner was Wake Up Boo! by the Boo Radleys. The BFBS listener seems quite wry.
"There'll be a guy who's been on guard duty out at a patrol base," says Miller, "and when he finally gets to a phone he'll ring up and ask for All Along the Watchtower. We had a gazebo go up in flames on the base at Kandahar the other day: within minutes, we had a dedication for the guy they think caused it – they wanted Firestarter."
"There is a squaddie humour, and they don't shy away from it," says Wright. "They're very keen on hearing Boom! Shake the Room." This doesn't mean, though, that questions of tone are unimportant. When the playlist computer spat out the Boomtown Rats' I Don't Like Mondays for broadcast after the terrorist killings in Norway in July, station staff decided not to play it. Yet unlike the BBC during the 1991 Gulf war, BFBS will happily play tracks by Massive Attack; the Killers are in the Forces 500 Top 10.
The aspect of the BFBS operation that perhaps most strongly emphasises their difference from a conventional broadcaster comes after a death. Whenever a serviceman or woman is killed or seriously injured, a process called Op Minimise begins across British military bases. The few phones and internet connections available for personnel to use are switched off, to prevent news accidentally getting out before next of kin have been informed. Within minutes, helicopters will be going in and out of their base next to the BFBS studio, bringing the dead and wounded back to Bastion's hospital.
"When there's an incident, if we're not the first, we're the second people called," says Miller. "We know that the mood around the camp is going to be very different, so the tone of our broadcasting's got to be slightly different. And we have so many dedications, requests, mentions, that we need to know pretty quickly, before we start saying 'Happy anniversary darling' from a wife to a soldier."
Sometimes, though, the information doesn't get through in time. Shortly after BFBS began broadcasting from Bastion, five soldiers were killed by an Afghan police officer they had been training. One of them was Regimental Sergeant Major Darren Chant, whose wife had recently been interviewed by BFBS in the UK.
"I'd got the piece of audio from our reporter on the Monday," Miller says. "His wife was pregnant at the time. She was saying the bump was getting bigger, and 'I know we haven't heard from you, but we know you're busy,' and so on. So I played it out, and 12 hours later he was dead. That affected me for probably three to four weeks afterwards. Every time I got a dedication or a piece of audio, I almost didn't want to play it, just in case."
Even two years on, it's something that still visibly affects the presenter.
"I don't know, but I would like to think that the last time he heard from his wife was actually on my radio show," he says. "I normally clear out all my audio, but it's the one piece I just can't get rid of. And one day I will go and see his wife – and baby George, who he never got to see – and say: 'Look, I need to introduce myself, and just tell you a little bit of it.'
"I try to say to all of our new presenters that it's nothing like you will broadcast anywhere else," Miller continues. "It's an emotional thing that you have to deal with. You hear that helicopter and you think, 'That's another family in the UK that's about to get some bad news.' I find it quite tough, and I've been doing it for years, so how you can prepare people for that is almost impossible. But that's the job, I'm afraid."
The skills – reading, responding to, helping reinforce or alter an audience's moods – seem to have more in common with a club DJ playing to a live audience than the average studio-bound radio host. BFBS's staff also have to be able to fill multiple roles.
"We're an attractive proposition for another station taking any of our staff," says Miller, "because with us, literally, you do everything. We don't have producers; you produce your own material. You're not going to sit here for 30 years just reading news. You do interviews, promotions, marketing, even TV reporting; you write your own scripts."
Wider awareness of its role and impact is growing. Last year BFBS won a Sony award for their services to the forces and to radio; David Beckham dropped in on the station during a visit to Bastion. This June, Tim Westwood spent a week at the base and broadcast a show live in the second annual 10-Hour Takeover linkup between Radio 1 and the BFBS – a visit that, as the Guardian reported this week, secured him admiration among the troops.
A higher profile for British radio's best-kept secret may be useful. BFBS operates on a 10-year contract, which is up for renewal in 2013. In the past, they've been the only bidder, but under EU legislation the MoD is obliged to open the process up. It's not the most attractive proposition for a commercial broadcaster – apart from the considerable expense of maintaining a global infrastructure, much of it in war zones, any profit BFBS makes goes to charity – but the network is gearing up for a challenge. Despite the British government's plans to end combat operations in Afghanistan by 2015, the radio station will be needed in the country for some time beyond that.
"If there's an entitled British person there we'll do something to get the services to them," says Wright. "We always try to leave a transmitter, and if there wasn't a transmitter, there'd be a satellite TV system. In that respect, we're still in Iraq. It was only quite recently we turned off the last transmitter in the Balkans."
Miller adds: "Often, we're the ones who switch the lights out and bid the place goodbye. When the combat troops are drawn down and pull out of here, there'll still be a significant number of them mentoring Afghan police and that sort of stuff. And what they want is some semblance of normality, right to the last."
Dusty Miller returned to the UK two weeks ago; Ops Breakfast's new presenter is George Ryland.
