I’ve been commissioned to write a lyric or spoken-word piece for the Proms. It’s an idea we discussed 12 months ago, to mark the centenary of the first broadcast of the Shipping Forecast on BBC radio. The anniversary seems something of a moveable feast, given the many iterations of this form of weather report, but in the end 2025 is the agreed year.
Imagineers of all kinds have been drawn to the Shipping Forecast over the decades, and poets are no exception, tapping in to the incantatory nature of the language and the invocation of place names that seem both real and mythical, precise and arbitrary. Apart from flunking my English exam, the reason I decided to study geography at degree level had much to do with a romantic view of the world, a feeling that adventures on Earth were still possible, even if expeditions were bit dodgy, closely related to colonialisation, empire-building and exploitation. The Shipping Forecast carries the same romantic promise, and appeals to those travellers who prefer to sail the coastal waters of the western European archipelago from the safety of their armchairs. Or from their beds, given that two regular transmission times are very early morning and the middle of the night. Insomniacs are particular devotees.
Other aspects of its popularity can be traced to its ritualised vocabulary, the measured tone by which it is announced, its reliable companionship (one missed broadcast in all that time) and its rigorously controlled length – it isn’t going to detain you indefinitely. For some, it’s an acceptable version of patriotism or an alternative national anthem, an example of British eccentricity and tradition at its best, sounding somewhere between a church service and Test Match Special, having planted itself in our subconscious without us even realising we could receive longwave. Nostalgia for a time we never really knew, perhaps. Or it’s a cultural certainty and comfort blanket in an otherwise bonkers world, like The Archers. And of course, it’s the weather, which we love to talk about.
Personally I’m fascinated by the contradictions, the way a calm and anchored voice can be describing the most treacherous conditions; the inclusivity by which landlubbers (ie, 99.9 per cent of us) are made to feel like seasoned deckhands or pilots; the conjuring up of highly visual phenomena by a single voice; and the unapologetic meteorological jargon that somehow makes perfect sense. And, of course, its formulaic mantra is a huge part of its charm, especially to list-makers, cataloguers, categorisers and completists, people who probably have their favourite Shipping Forecast area, or can recite all 31 areas in the same way they can reel off the crew of the Trumpton Fire Brigade, or the plays of Shakespeare in chronological order, or sing Tom Lehrer’s periodic table song “The Elements”.
Beyond all that, my mind returns to the word “forecast”, remembering that to some extent the transmission is a premonition of conditions to come. No matter that meteorology is a highly advanced science these days, the weather is never completely predictable, and coupled with the hypnotic presentation of the broadcast, delivered into those hours of the day when sleep and wakefulness bleed into one another, the Shipping Forecast has all the characteristics of prophecy or divination. It makes the accompanying map a zodiac, and each bulletin a horoscope.
My own favourite Shipping Forecast area? Rockall. The adolescent in me will never stop enjoying the sound of the word, being so close to a profanity meaning zilch. Sweet Rockall. And the sentimental geographer in me will always be curious about the uninhabitable remote islet that lends the shipping area its name, a lump of granite poking its bald bonce out of the North Atlantic hundreds of miles from anywhere. It isn’t true, as an MP in the Commons once said, that more people have landed on the moon than have landed on Rockall, but it’s given me a great idea.
[See also: What is school for?]
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This article appears in the 02 Apr 2025 issue of the New Statesman, What is school for?