DID you know that Utsire is an island that constitutes Norway’s smallest municipality? Or that FitzRoy is named after Vice-Admiral Robert FitzRoy, the mid-Victorian pioneer of modern weather forecasting?
Radio 4 celebrated the first day of 2025 with a haul of programmes celebrating the centenary of the Shipping Forecast, whose 31 named areas resonate so deeply in British culture that one of those programmes was a special edition of Poetry Please dedicated to verse inspired by it.
It was, perhaps, too much on one day, even for a Bank Holiday, in the age of online catch-up. The worst scheduling decision was to have the day’s forecasts themselves read by “celebrities”: a tragic and increasingly common case of Radio 4 trying too hard to be cool — and failing.
Many of the one-off commissions, however, had a graceful charm, not least The Shipping Postcards, recorded by members of the continuity announcement team from places named in the forecast. The Sub-Dean of St Davids and the cathedral choir came across well in a feature about the headland, St David’s Head, that guards one of the boundaries of the inshore-waters forecast.
The most successful programme, however, was Paddy O’Connell’s The Shipping Forecast: A beginner’s guide. It was here that we learned of the fate of FitzRoy (incidentally, a particularly devout churchman): he took his own life when his ideas about weather forecasting and shipping safety proved to be too advanced for the technology of the time to deliver. Inevitably, those ideas were widely accepted after his death.
Viji Alles and his sonorous bass guided O’Connell through the precise formulae by which each forecast is put together. The precision of subject order, geographical movement, cadence, and tone is almost liturgical. It is because it is so regular and rhythmic that listeners had stories to tell of its comforting them in times of peril and depression for another of the day’s commissions, The Shipping Forecast: A haven.
The comfort of the familiar when the world goes to hell is something that the Church has ditched too casually; for the world is always changing, including the Shipping Forecast. Radio 4’s Long Wave transmissions are being switched off in less than three months, which means that it will no longer be receivable more than a few dozen miles from shore without satellite-based internet access. Those who have that — and they must now be the enormous majority of seafarers — have constant access to vastly more sophisticated real-time weather information.
Yet the forecast’s familiar, regular cadences have warmed many of our hearts on a cold night while the wind beat against our bedroom window pane, and at least for a while they will continue to do so, even if now only twice a day.