DAME Judi Dench's choice of the Shipping Forecast as one of her eight recordings on Desert Island Discs this week was interesting.
Like untold thousands of us, Dame Judi listens regularly to the forecast on Radio 4, last thing at night. It's not going too far to say that she seems to be hooked. "Every night that I hear it," she told Kirsty Young, "I go right round the country, listening to them all." She even lamented the disappearance of the most romantic name of them all - Finisterre, which was re-named FitzRoy, after the founder of the Met Office.
You don't have to be on some distant sea-going vessel to find the Shipping Forecast essential listening. Even if you don't have the faintest idea where Fitzroy/Finisterre is, there's something compellingly rhythmic and strangely comforting about it all: "Viking, North Utsire, South Utsire, southwesterly five to seven, veering northwesterly four or five later, showers; good. Forties, Cromarty, Forth, west or southwest five to seven ..." That said, 'comforting' is probably the last word that would come to mind if you really were on some distant vessel and had just learned that fierce gales were on the way.
I usually drift off to sleep listening to the Shipping Forecast after the midnight news, idly wondering, as ever, exactly where North Utsire and South Utsire are. If I forget to turn the radio off, I usually hear the whole thing again at 5am, alongside the coastal stations and the automatic weather-logging stations: Greenwich Light Vessel Automatic, Scilly Automatic. (That last one always makes me smile.) I still, in fact, miss that lovely, trance-like song that used to usher in a new day on Radio 4 - The Celts, by Enya.
The Shipping Forecast has become a cult favourite. Actor Samuel West uses the word 'beautiful' to describe it. The Beeb's website has Alan Bennett reading it at the behest of Michael Palin (who thinks of it as poetry), and John Prescott reading it out for Comic Relief. It has found its way into the poetry of Seamus Heaney and Carol Ann Duffy and the songs of Radiohead, Blur and Jethro Tull. And when Radio 4 accidentally failed to broadcast the Forecast one morning in May 2014, hundreds of complaints were received.
It has been reported that despite the Met Office losing its BBC contract, the Shipping Forecast will carry on: the Met Office it to continue supplying data to the Maritime & Coastguard Agency, which produces the broadcast. Knowing that, we can all sleep easier in our beds. Viking, North Utsire, South Utsire ....
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