On 10 May 1945-just 48 hours after Germany's surrender-the words "The British Forces network" (BFN) were heard for the first time, and a studio center-a true radio station-was quickly established at the famous Musikhalle in Hamburg. The programs became increasingly sophisticated and varied-the BFN dance orchestra made its debut in May 1946-and original drama productions became a regular feature. Some of the best-known British postwar actors, musicians, scriptwriters, and singers gained their first experience with BFN Hamburg.

     In the same period, the All Forces Programme was established in India; the British Pacific Programme broadcast over the transmitter of Radio Australia, which could also be heard in Singapore; and a Forces Broadcasting Service continued to develop in the Middle East and in several European locations, including Trieste and Austria. By the late 1940s and early 1950s, major stations had been established in Kenya, Malta, Cyprus, Libya, and Gibraltar. In short, the precedent was established that wherever in the world British troops were to be found in any quantity, a Forces radio service would be established to serve them, providing a mixture of vital information, education, morale-boosting entertainment, and a "link with home."

     For millions of civilians "back home," the existence of BFN was indelibly linked in the mind with Sunday lunchtimes through an enormously popular record request program, which was co hosted by a British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) presenter in London and a BFN announcer in Hamburg (later Cologne) and broadcast simultaneously over both the BBC's Light Programme and BFN. Family Favourites began in October 1945, and at its peak the show had a U.K. audience of some r 6 million. The program survived, in slightly varied formats and time slots, until January 1980, by which time direct communications between troops and their families and friends back home had largely become easy and routine. The most famous of the on-air partnerships, from 1949, was between Jean Metcalfe for the BBC and the then Royal Air Force Squadron Leader Cliff Michelmore, who was to become one of the best-known broadcasters in the United Kingdom. The two met for the first time during Michelmore's visit to London a couple of months after their on-air relationship began, and, much to the fascination of the British public and popular press, this quickly turned into a "radio romance," and the couple married.

     In 1953 BFN was forced to give up its AM (mediumwave) frequency of 274 meters-which had been- "commandeered" toward the end of the war but which was now reallocated under the Copenhagen Plan-and share the 247-meter frequency with the BBC's Light Programme. Because AM radio waves travel further at night, programming output was reduced to just a couple of hours a day in the winter months so as not to interfere with reception of the BBC's programs in the United Kingdom. The farsighted and technically innovative solution to this problem was to move transmissions to a new waveband and transmission standard. Thus, in February 1956, BFN became the first English-speaking network to move wholly to the very-high-frequency (VHF) band, using frequency modulation (FM) transmission. Two years before this, the main broadcasting studios had moved from Hamburg to a modern studio complex in two renovated villas in a high-class district of Cologne. By this time it was estimated that several million German civilians were tuning in to the BFN.

     At the beginning of the 1960s, a standard name for the mul­tiple services across the globe-BFBS-was mandated by headquarters. This period also saw the end of military conscription ("the draft") in the United Kingdom, and, increasingly, broadcasting staff were recruited directly from civilian life in the United Kingdom rather than being "seconded" from their military duties. Throughout the rapidly changing background of both the United Kingdom's military commitments and broadcasting styles in the 1960s and 1970s, BFBS continued to serve its special audience wherever they were stationed. Major locations provided stations with local output, backed by network programming taped at the BFBS London studios that featured some of the best-known U.K. presenters and journalists. Where radio transmissions were impractical-such as at very small military outposts and on board navy ships and submarines-programs were recorded on cassette and posted out for local relay.

     In September 1975 the radio network in Germany was augmented by a television service, although it was a further seven years before TV programs could be broadcast "live" from the United Kingdom.

     The biggest shake-up of the organization since its inception came about in 1982, when BFBS, which had been a branch of the Ministry of Defence (with U.K. staff treated as civil servants), became part of the new Services Sound and Vision Corporation (SSVC), a self-supporting registered charity formed by a merger between BFBS and the Services Kinema Corporation (SKC). Income is derived from a mixture of grants from the U.K. government and commercial activities. Any surpluses are donated to welfare support for the armed forces.

     With the "peace dividend" following the end of the Cold War in the early 1990s, British troops were massively cut back in West Germany, which had always been the largest BFBS overseas operation. Even before these political and military upheavals, however, it had been decided to move BFBS Ger­ many's main studios from Cologne-which for years had been some distance from the main garrisons-to Herford, supported by a number of smaller contribution and "opt out" studios. The Berlin station closed in 1994 after 33 years of operation, as the World War II Allies withdrew from the formerly divided city, which was once more to be capital of a united Germany. During the Cold War, a substantial and loyal audience-at considerable risk-had listened to the service from behind the Iron Curtain.

     Today, two BFBS radio stations and the television service are available to British Forces personnel in Germany, the Balkans, Cyprus, Gibraltar, Brunei, the Falklands, and Belize. Temporary stations were also set up in Afghanistan in 2001 and Kuwait in 2003-the latter also gaining a large and appreciative audience of U.S. service personnel-in response to the U.K.'s military involvement in the conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq. Northern Ireland now also has its own radio service, and in 1999 local radio stations were set up at a number of army garrisons in England, using the old name of BFN. The major overseas BFBS radio services broadcast a mixture of locally originated programming of information and entertainment combined with network programs, both from the BBC and those specially made for a services audience, produced at state­ of-the-art digital studios in Buckinghamshire, England, and transmitted by satellite around the clock.