Virginia Woolf listened to one of the first BBC broadcasts of the Shipping Forecast just over a hundred years ago. She recorded in her diary that it was “all gale & flood; these words are exact”about the New Year in East Sussex. Perhaps if she’d listened less to The Shipping Forecast, she might have paid more attention to the storms in her own life.
The British Shipping Forecast has captured the imagination of several writers. According to Seamus Heaney, the Irish bard, it was a "hissing penumbra," and according to the former Scottish folk poet—or pardon me, poet laureate—Carol Ann Duffy, it is nothing less than a "modern prayer." Incidentally, her poem, was inspired by Heaney’s, because poets often aren't satisfied with just one source.
According to Heaney, it wasn't just a hissing shadow, but also "verbal music." Numerous musicians agreed with him. In the song "Pharaohs" by Tears for Fears, exact lines from the Shipping Forecast are read aloud. Most people will probably be more familiar with the other side of the 1985 record: "Everybody Wants to Rule the World."
"This Is a Low" by Blur isn't exactly something to cheer about. It's in the low forties. "Up the Thyne, Firth and Cromarty," sings Jarvis Cocker, the lead singer.. Mind you, we're talking Fahrenheit here, so that’s barely five degrees Celsius. Brrr. "Finding ways to stay solo" is the song's other rather dispiriting message.
More uplifting is the song "Sailing By" by BBC musician Roland Binge. It is sometimes played for the first nighttime version of the Forcast which is a few minutes longer than the evening version most people hear. Cocker, the Pulp singer, named it as one of his favourite songs when he was invited on Desert Island Discs, a BBC program almost as iconic as the Shipping Forecast. Cocker wasn't alone; singer Michael Ball and rower Ben Ainslie also chose the song.
Over the years, Cocker has been one of the prominent guests invited to read the Shipping Forecast. Other well-known names include Stephen Frye and former Deputy Prime Minister John Prescott, who frequently stumbled over his words in Parliament, but read the Shipping Forecast flawlessly.
Let's end with the storms that are often a feature of the Shipping Forecast. The poem "Finisterre" by the writer Sylvia Plath, who also weathered storms in her life, was inspired by the Shipping Forecast. The title refers to one of its 31 former regions. Today, that region is called FitzRoy. It's also quite nice, but I don't think Plath would have used it in her poem.
“Occasionally poor.” 😀. Loved listening to the forecast audio.