There are warnings of gales. Wintry showers, rain later, moderate or good. The familiar rhythms and cadences of these misty, magical phrases have now been familiar to British islanders for a whole century. They are communicated to us at strange, twilit times, every weekday at 12.48am and 5.20am, with an extra gust of early-evening drama at 5.54am at weekends.
The Shipping Forecast celebrates its 100th year of broadcast on the BBC in 2025, and this New Year’s Day, Radio 4 is going storm-sized in its appreciation. The simple bulletin, issued by the Met Office on behalf of the Maritime and Coastguard Agency (try reading that without taking on the measured, honeyed tones of a continuity announcer) is the subject of the station’s regular series that day, as well as several special documentaries.
Paddy O’Connell begins the celebrations with The Shipping Forecast: A Beginners Guide before Radio 4 announcers send special audio “postcards” from different shipping locations such as Dogger and Lundy mid-morning. Later in the day, Front Row is hosting an outside broadcast from the Cutty Sark, featuring guests such as Meg Clothier, sailor, lifelong forecast listener and author of The Shipping Forecast: 100 Years. The appeal of the forecast is huge and mysterious, she says, anchored as it is to universal elements. “The words and the rhythms are sort of bigger than the here and now.”
The forecast also attracts very different people, says Clothier: geeky people “who like detail and facts” and those who like its “more emotional, otherworldly, poetical aspect”; people who like to be “safe and cosy at home”, as well as those who like adventure and risk; plus people at both ends of the political spectrum. “It articulates quite a positive sort of nationalism, where we can be proud of where we live as a place we all share – especially as the Shipping Forecast ignores political and country boundaries. It offers a positive sense of belonging, a sense of home. Plus when you talk to people about it, immediately they start talking about their dad, their grandad or their uncle. It offers that line through time.”
The Shipping Forecast’s own timeline begins in mid-19th century maritime Britain. Vice-Admiral Robert FitzRoy, a seasoned seaman who had taken Charles Darwin with him on The Beagle, got a job analysing past weather data in 1854, but he ambitiously aimed to predict future weather, too. The invention of the electric telegraph, which could propel information about weather systems across the North Atlantic, helped FitzRoy along. So did a sense of urgency following the 1859 Royal Charter disaster, where more than 450 people drowned off the Anglesey coast.
FitzRoy also invented weather maps, which he called “synoptic charts”, a reference to the New Testament’s synoptic gospels and their all-seeing perspective on the miracles they saw. His first weather warning, of a gale on the north-east coast, went out two years later; radio transmission began in 1911; the BBC sent them out in all winds and weathers from October 1925. A calm, knowledgable voice taking the listener from south-east Iceland to the German Bight was suddenly part of our culture, an all-seeing being who could tell all of us what was to come.
The Shipping Forecast: A Haven, a half-hour documentary about the last shipping forecast of the day, features one of these voices: Radio 4 continuity announcer Al Ryan. The bulletin before the 1am closedown, he says, “is the very special one … you’re there on your own in the studio with a microphone, dimmed lights, and it’s an atmosphere you create.”
He also tells us about one summer night when the bulletin ran short. Instead of playing a trail for a future programme, he read out an email from a listener homesick in Hong Kong, finding “great comfort” in the forecast. Adding he’d love to hear from other people listening in, soon after “the floodgates opened”. The Shipping Forecast: A Haven, part of Radio 4’s Illuminated series, features other people who love it, including a professional surfer, a woman who named her two sons, Fisher and Malin, after shipping regions, and the moving story of Bill and Jack (the latter in his late 90s, living on his own) who made the Shipping Forecast a vital part of their friendship during the Covid-19 pandemic. A warning for this, too: you will need tissues.
The Shipping Forecast’s influence on the arts is also oceanic. Seamus Heaney described the bulletin itself as “verbal music … bedding the ear with a kind of linguistic hardcore that could be built upon some day”. His 1979 Glanmore Sonnets were inspired by it, as were Carol Ann Duffy’s Prayer and John O’Donnell’s The Shipping Forecast. Radio 4’s Poetry Please special on New Year’s Day dips into other shipping poems in briny detail.
Then there’s music. Elements of the forecast have appeared in songs by Radiohead (In Limbo), folk singer Lisa Knapp (Shipping Song), post-punk band Wire (Mercy) and, perhaps most famously, Blur. “We always found the Shipping Forecast soothing,” Blur bassist Alex James told Select magazine in 1995, talking about how the band used to listen to it on international tours. It later inspired their ballad This Is a Low, a fantastical tour of the Shipping Forecast regions (“Up the Tyne, Forth and Cromarty”), through which melancholia surges like waves, each chorus beginning with Damon Albarn whispering: “and the radio says”. “We used to listen to it to remind us of home,” said James.
Its rhythms can also, however, inspire wilder interpretations. Murray Lachlan Young’s The People’s Shipping Forecast in 2015 was a poetic reimagining of the bulletin, based on Radio 4 listeners’ suggestions. A forecast was sampled on the Prodigy’s 1992 rave track Weather Experience, which whipped from a throbbing techno tumult to ambient calm, In 2003, the electronic producer Rob Overseer’s Heligoland used the structure to create a shipping forecast “for the next 168 hours”. Delivered by well-known announcer Brian Perkins, it broke down eerily as it proceeded, with news of “hesitation”, “dilated pupils” and “head-on-impact” emerging before the eruption of a cyclonic whirlwind of strings.
It is easy to forget that fear and danger lurk in this forecast, too: during Storm Darragh this month, it was a particularly severe listen, the bulletins themselves stretching to more than 12-and-a-half minutes. But one element that has given it an atmosphere of calm, whatever the weather, is its theme: Ronald Binge’s Sailing By, a masterpiece of light orchestral music first used before the forecast in 1973. Full of soft repetitive phrases and the occasional gentle breeze of flute, it can be neatly edited to fill the precise time between the preceding programme and that night’s bulletin.
Jarvis Cocker picked Sailing By as his favourite Desert Island Disc in 2005, describing it as a perfect companion for any marooned lonely soul. “It would remind you of the fact that there are boats out there listening to the Shipping Forecast, and some of them might sail nearby so you could get rescued,” he explained. “This is something that could help me deal with that isolation.”
On New Year’s Day, the theme is the subject of Radio 4’s Soul Music, the series which dedicates each episode to people’s connections to a specific song or track. A retired Scottish lookout remembers first hearing it while looking out for hazards at sea, and how he immediately “found it synonymous with the elements around me”. A woman remembers her Barbadian grandmother, living in the windy hills of the island, singing it to all her grandchildren in bed, like a lullaby. And Ronald Binge’s son, Chris, who was seven when it was written, remembers his father.
As he does, we hear a piano version of Sailing By, played by Binge’s grandson, Dave Spooner, which he recorded specially for the programme. That line through time keeps carrying us through the skies, seas and storms, showing us how time passes, just like the weather does. North Utsire. South Utsire. Occasionally poor. Becoming good.
The Shipping Forecast Day airs throughout New Year’s Day, Radio 4.
