The Shipping Forecast on Radio 4, 100 years old this October, seems to have achieved the impossible. Few people know the places it reports on when it gives the weather conditions in its 31 regions. Almost no one understands the finer points of what it’s telling them – about wind force and direction, atmospheric pressure, or visibility out at sea. Not many working people are even awake at the times it’s broadcast in the early hours. Yet you feel that if the BBC ever tried to cancel it, there would be a revolution.
Its very opacity is part of its charm, as well as the vivid but workaday metaphors it supplies us with
Few radio programmes have a more enduring place in the nation’s psyche; it’s inspired songs by Blur, Radiohead and Wire, poems by Seamus Heaney and Carol Ann Duffy, and has appeared (or been talked about) in films like Ken Loach’s Kes or Terence Davies’ Distant Voices, Still Lives. Olivia
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