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The Shipping Forecast

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193 pointstolien76 comments

I used the Shipping Forecast as a "self-assessment" when I move to London. When moved there, my English was not the best. I was staying up late at nights, listening BBC4 to improve my listening and I will listen to the shipping forecast every night and don't understand ANYTHING.

That was for the first year, life moves on, and there I was, listening to the Shipping Forecast 3-4 years later. "Ey, I can get now some words and the overall meaning!". I have to say it felt good.

A few more years later, and it was my last night living in the UK (Brexit means Brexit), and I went to listen to it again. Seven years later, since the first time I hear it, I was able to catch everything on the forecast.

For me, the Shipping Forecast will always be something special.

Related in theme but off-topic: When I started med school in 1970, I was all full of myself as a doctor-to-be so I took advantage of the very cheap student rate and subscribed to the New England Journal of Medicine. The first issue arrived: Yikes! I didn't understand a word of it. Fast forward to 1974 when I graduated: reading and understanding the NEJM was effortless, as easy as Sports Illustrated.

That's my favorite part of learning anything. No matter what I pick up, initially the lingo makes no sense. Then over time, words and phrases get associated with meanings and my mental map of the subject gets rid of 'Here Be Dragons'. Felt the same about Computer Science, Accounting, ERP systems, kayaking, AI, Cricut, and cockatiels. No matter what the field, nothing makes sense initially. "Birds clean their crop? What?"

Now I am at the same place of confusion with Go (the game). The more things don't make sense, the more excited I am. From experience, I know most people dread this feeling of not-knowing. But it is my favorite place to be because I know at the end of it, I will have learned something.

I'm a medical student, and I had my wowsers moment when I attended a conference a bit over a year ago and realised that, unlike the previous conference I had attended, I suddenly knew what everybody was on about! The acronyms, shorthands, etc - it really is another language!

In the same vein (no pun intended): when I began my anesthesiology residency, I received a free subscription to the journal Anesthesiology as part of my resident membership in the American Society of Anesthesiologists. The first issue came: frightening! As had been the case years earlier with the NEJM when I started med school, I couldn't understand anything. The table of contents might just as well have been written in Urdu. Flash forward a year: my first scientific publication (a Letter to the Editor) appeared in Anesthesia and Analgesia. Nothing like a little fear to accelerate the learning curve!

The Shipping Forecast is a very significant cultural reference in the UK. It crops up all over the place. Britain is _fundamentally_ an island and a seafaring nation, and that's something Americans miss; you're never more than seventy miles from the sea. It's as iconic as, I don't know, Thanksgiving football in the US; it's a thing everyone knows about without explanation.

This is from an album which sold over 1.2m copies in the UK; one of the biggest records of the 90s: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SD8gO8TAr4s

And the music that runs up against it at night, Sailing Away, equally important reference. The nights I lay there, imagining the storms out there, particularly when depressed and alone, listening to the post-midnight "ceremonies" including the national anthem and lulled off to sleep before the World Service crept onto the airwaves... so many nights. It really is a part of me in some ways.

It's interesting to me just how important BBC Radio 4 (formerly the Home Service), on which it is broadcast, is and has been to our collective culture.

It's now seen in a more middle-class "sniffy" light - Radio 4 listeners are a certain "type", but think what it's given us:

- It's where The Goons became famous: Peter Sellers, Spike Milligan and Harry Seacombe defined a certain age of comedy and inspired Monty Python and others.

- Mornington Crescent is ironically one of the most iconic stations on the London Underground thanks to the game from the R4 show

- All of Churchill's war-time speeches were broadcast there first

- In the event of the death of the Queen, it will be announced first on the 8am Radio 4 news broadcast the following day (I'm not sure that can work in the modern era, but there we are)

- Royal Navy Nuclear (weapon) submarines are to open a safe with hand-written letters of instruction from the Prime Minister if they can't pick up Radio 4 long-wave

That's just off the top of my head.

>> Royal Navy Nuclear (weapon) submarines are to open a safe with hand-written letters of instruction from the Prime Minister if they can't pick up Radio 4 long-wave

It is one of many factors. Shutting down Radio 4 will not send the subs into attack mode. I do laugh every time I read about the "hand written" part. The assumption is that PMs are unable to use typewriters. Anything typed would therefore have been handled by their secretaries/PAs, making them a target. I have this image in my head of a sub captain not being able to read the PM's handwriting. These are embellished protections generated by novelists.

I'm pretty sure Peter Hennessy was one of the first to report on the nature of Letters of Last Resort and I'd be inclined to believe his account.

Having them handwritten seems entirely appropriate to me.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Letters_of_last_resort

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Hennessy

NB Hennessy is obviously well in with the Navy - he has attended during the Perisher course - maybe an advantage to be being a historian who is also a Peer!

Be wary of believing any account when it comes to nuclear weapons procedures. There is much misinformation. Changes happen all the time. Some of the public stories have been adopted strait from fiction. The letters have been the subject of so many spy thrillers they are now more myth than functional.

The very concept of the letters presupposes that sub crews have full control over their missiles, that they can fire them based on instructions in a hand-written letter. That does not mesh with the safeguards surrounding other weapons that require external command/codes prior to launch.

It's also fairly well documented that UK Trident sub warheads do not have Permissive Action Links - the crews of the subs do indeed have the ability to launch without receiving any codes.

The justification for this is pretty simple - timing. In the event of a launch from a likely enemy (the Soviet Union in the bad old days) there simply wasn't enough time to guarantee that a code be transmitted before weapons bursting.

> The very concept of the letters presupposes that sub crews have full control over their missiles, that they can fire them based on instructions in a hand-written letter. That does not mesh with the safeguards surrounding other weapons that require external command/codes prior to launch.

The whole point of the submarine component of the strategic triad is to be the ultimate guarantor of MAD by presenting the capacity for launching a retaliatory strike in the event of sudden destruction of the highest command authorities (and, potentially, the land-based components of the triad), so it is absolutely plausible that submarines have a looser set of controls than bombers and land-based missiles because otherwise there would be no point in having them.

And in the case of the UK we don't have a triad - just the 4 Vanguard-class boats.

And Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.

V. Important

Sailing By, not 'away'...

It is there to pad out the schedule and help people to find Radio 4 on a crowded night-time dial. Same with the National Anthem that follows. Even the 'pips' are there for this type of calibration, a tuning in to a British person's 'Britishness'.

The way that the BBC is deeply woven into the British establishment and armed forces is obvious yet not so obvious. The BBC is a spin-off of British Forces Broadcasting Service, as per 'Better Call Saul'/'Breaking Bad' some content overlaps but the 'producers' are one and the same.

You should never believe that the BBC is independently funded and free from some capitalist proprietor controlling what you think, it really is an organ of the British military industrial complex. Anyone 'socialist' gets weeded out by the very real 'Room 101'.

Radio 4 is the true voice of establishment, and this differs slightly from the clowns of the day that happen to be in parliament. If you listen carefully then you can glean facts on BBC Radio 4 that are not presented on the TV news or written to paper, an off-hand comment here or there on an odd-hour Radio 4 program sneaks through when the rest of the world are self-censoring themselves during a crisis.

When BBC Radio 4 rolls over and defaults to Number 10 propaganda without being honest, e.g. asserting that Russians are poisoning people in the UK without any 'alleged' or 'suspected' style words to distance fiction from fact, then that is when the folks in the submarine should go for the envelope...

> The BBC is a spin-off of British Forces Broadcasting Service

BFBS was established in 1943

The BBC was founded in 1922

Which BBC Room 101 are you asserting is "very real"?

I believe the original Room 101 was just a meeting room in where Blair had to sit through boring meetings.

Blair?

Allegedly Orwell named Room 101 after a meeting room in BBC Broadcasting House that no longer exists.

George Orwell was Eric Blair's pen name.

That's funny, my conservative friends say that the BBC is biased and full of lefties against the government.

https://www.bbc.com/news/stories-43754737

I grew up in Miami. I can't imagine living more than a few hours drive from the ocean. So I sort of understand. FWIW, Hawaiians, Puerto Ricans, and other island-living Americans probably get it too. :-)

I grew up very near the Puget Sound in Washington state, and I feel the same way!

I just did a bit of research and discovered that in 2010, 39% of Americans lived in a coastal county. Given that many counties are rather small, especially on the East Coast, I wouldn't be surprised if as many as 50 or 60% of Americans lived within 70 miles of the coast.

> Britain is _fundamentally_ an island and a seafaring nation, and that's something Americans miss; you're never more than seventy miles from the sea.

In 2010, 123 million Americans, or 39 percent of the nation’s population lived in counties directly on the ocean.

There's only 53 million people living in Britain total.

When I was a student, doing lots of late nights, the shipping forecast helped lull me off to sleep. It's rhythmic, without being too repetitive.

It's an aural duvet that makes you feel safe and conformable. Not just because of the way it sounds, but also the fact that you know there are lots of people doing all the work needed to bring us the forecast and help keep mariners safe.

Even though I now live in Ireland, I still tune in to BBC Radio 4 on long wave every now and again to hear it. It's a unique and wonderful thing which I fear won't be around in a decade or two.

FYI, BBC Radio 4 is available on the BBC IPlayer Radio app. That might be more convenient than longwave.

The BBC doesn't geoblock its radio shows, unlike the TV programmes, which can only be viewed from a UK IP address.

There is something nice about listening to it over long wave though. The crackling and the fading adds a certain charm. I kind of want to enjoy while it lasts, the BBC has said that when the LW transmitter valves fail they won't be replaced signalling the end of Radio 4 long wave.

As for the iPlayer the BBC has started to mess around with geoblocks on radio shows. For example I can listen to the News Quiz and I'm Sorry I Haven't a Clue, but Dead Ringers is geoblocked. Also, the shows I can listen to now contain adverts along with a voice at the start telling me that BBC radio shows and podcasts are ad-supported outside the UK. This mildly disappoints me.

> the BBC has said that when the LW transmitter valves fail they won't be replaced

They better tell the Royal Navy - the broadcast of the Today Show on Radio 4 LW is one of the tests submarine captains supposedly use to detect if the UK has been annihilated in a nuclear strike.

I think the BBC would probably run cap in hand to the MOD to pay for a new transmitter in that case. The BBC transmitter is getting on for 70 years old, once it fails repairing it will require custom made equipment or complete replacement - both of which will be very expensive.

One other curious issue with radio 4 LW is that it carries a data sub-carrier for the National Radio Teleswitch. Basically the signal that controls the Economy 7 and Economy 10 heating systems. If Radio 4 LW goes off-air any renaming E7 and E10 systems will just stop working.

One crazy proposal that went nowhere was for the BBC to move Radio 4 LW to RTÉs Clrakstown transmitter in Ireland. That used to be the Atlantic 252 transmitter (remember them?) but has been carrying RTÉ Radio 1 since that venture failed and RTÉ really wants to shut it down. The transmitter at that site was built in 1998 which makes it a very young in radio transmitter terms.

Not the BBC any more. They were required to privatise tranmission in 97. Not sure who owns them now.

The Beeb still has a couple of world service transmitters I think, but the rest are gone.

Arqiva. Owned by an Australian investment bank. They also own the old IBA transmission network that broadcasts ITV/C4 and co-owns the Freeview service. I.E. They hold a monopoly on TV and radio transmission in the UK. Plus with the roll-out of 4/5G mobile all those hilltop sites are making them a fortune for providing microwave relay feeds for data services.

RTÉ still owns their network as 2rn Ltd (the callsign of Irelands first radio station - phonetically 'To Erin') and they are making decent money from providing the same mobile services. Making the BBC sell off their transmission network was shortsighted.

I'm a radio and love all this. The head engineer of 2rn is a member of my radio club - he really knows his stuff.

Lest anyone think this is a joke at least the BBC themselves think it's true:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/newsbeat/article/36824917/trident-what-...

They had a captain of a nuke sub on the Today programme once, and they asked him.

His answer was that there was a protocol of multiple checks, including Radio 4 LW. Not the only check, but definitely one of them.

Of course, you can listen to the longwave transmission via the internet:

http://websdr.ewi.utwente.nl:8901/ (198kHz, AM)

"aural duvet" is a wonderful turn of phrase: just the sound of the words is soothing

The Shipping Forecast and other BBC radio shows can be listened to on BBC Radio 4 using the BBC IPlayer Radio app, for Android and iPhone.

The BBC's radio shows are not geoblocked (at least not the news programmes I listen to when travelling), unlike the TV shows which are only available from UK IP addresses.

(I originally posted this in the middle of a discussion. Reposting as a standalone comment in the hope it makes BBC R4 more accessible to people outside the UK).

Works on the web for me: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b0bbn714

From the last time this subject was discussed on HN, here's a copy of a shipping forecast: http://oirase.annexia.org/tmp/Shipping_Forecast_-_2017-12-27...

To get the "full effect" you have to use a small transistor radio, wait until after midnight and listen to Sailing By first ...

Oh, I dunno. I think to get the full effect, you need to be 13 years old, listening to it on a crystal radio you built from a diode scavenged from an old transistor radio and an earpiece from a broken telephone.

But that's just me and I get nostalgic at times :-)

Just as important (at least to me) is the song “Sailing By”, which is used to fill any extra time before the 00:48 broadcast. I wish the article would’ve given it a mention.

Everyone keeps mentioning "Sailing By", but no one seems to want to provide a link to it...

I guess this is it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dFdas-kMF74?

It's possibly because there are umpteen versions available, from performances by various orchestras (BBC Concert Orchestra to Philomusica of Edinburgh), through versions with added lyrics (one by Bernard Loughrey, others including a male voice choir and one by Binge himself and the Wimbledon Girl Singers), to people who captured it from broadcasts; as well as Wikipedia articles that are easily discoverable.

The UK Theme also has several broadcast versions, alone, of differing lengths.

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sailing_By

* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pr-T3vXbj8c

* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p6vDtPOhDqA

* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vSvf_wMfzLE

* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pFfftvIVVyo

* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CP_4w6GOQS0

* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QlPSuqXlS4I

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radio_4_UK_Theme

Fun fact: The performance of Sailing By used on BBC Radio 4 actually includes a wrong note. The mistake is easy to miss, but once you know about it, it becomes incredibly obvious.

You can hear about that in this clip from the BBC's Short Cuts programme:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p01hvk0x

And for morning people there was Fritz Spiegl's and Manfred Arlan's UK Theme.

M. Spiegl also did some jingles.

* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X_Bu6ESf530

The article played some music that was of its ilk, but not Sailing By.

Perhaps no one had told him?

The Scottish fishing village I grew up in had an area above the harbour called the "flagstaff" that conspicuously doesn't have any flags on it - reading this made me realise that this is where the forecast flags must have been flown.

The spot currently has a memorial for those lost at sea:

http://www.geograph.org.uk/photo/684627

I visit PK all the time, lovely place!

I always think of it as PTK - which I think is the old prefix used for fishing boat registrations. :-)

http://www.portknockiewebsite.co.uk/about-portknockie.php

This is only vaguely related, but I moved from the UK to the US, and missed the shipping forecast. Listening to it online isn't quite the same thing.

Eventually I stumbled across WWV[1], a shortwave station broadcast by NIST which has satisfied the need in my life.

Ostensibly it is for broadcasting the time, but it also includes storm warmings (especially from WWVH - the Hawaii transmitter), and space weather forecasts. So cool.

You can find it at 2.5, 5, 10, 15, and 20 MHz on your Shortwave radio.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WWV_(radio_station)

This captures the late-night, meditative feel of it to me:

    Prayer
    by Carol Ann Duffy

    Some days, although we cannot pray, a prayer
    utters itself. So, a woman will lift
    her head from the sieve of her hands and stare
    at the minims sung by a tree, a sudden gift.

    Some nights, although we are faithless, the truth
    enters our hearts, that small familiar pain;
    then a man will stand stock-still, hearing his youth
    in the distant Latin chanting of a train.

    Pray for us now. Grade 1 piano scales
    console the lodger looking out across
    a Midlands town. Then dusk, and someone calls
    a child's name as though they named their loss.

    Darkness outside. Inside, the radio's prayer -
    Rockall. Malin. Dogger. Finisterre.

Are you sure that's not by E.J. Thribb?

Definitely Carol Ann Duffy. It's the final poem from her 1993 collection Mean Time.

I was just kidding, E.J. Thribb is the house-poet of _Private Eye_, a half-satire/half-investigative-journalism magazine in the UK.

This poem shares some of the traits of his works, in particular the line breaks.

The shipping forecast is awesome[1]. If you're a surfer in Britain, grab a map [2] and learn how to visualise what's going to happen with the waves over the next couple of days while listening to the broadcast. Especially useful for North East coast surfers where the waves are short lived but can be surprisingly ok.

[1] As is 99pi [2] https://imgur.com/a/pb7nPr4

Does it actually still serve a purpo (other than putting people to sleep)? As in are sailors tuning in to figure out the weather in the middle of the night. Surely there are better solutions for this now. I know most airports have automated weather reports that broadcast continuously on dedicated frequencies (ATIS) at least. The same information is available digitally. Many pilots have tools providing them with near real time updates on weather. There are even dedicated ipad apps for this.

As a sailor I do often check the shipping forecast (or the inshore waters forecast, also from the met office, similar content but focused on weather close to the shore). Yes you can now easily get detailed hour by hour forecasts in the form of gribs which I do use too. However you can suffer from information overload, especially as multiple weather models are available. There's also a difference between a forecast and grib. A forecast is something prepared by a meteorologist, a grib is just the output of a weather model. So the charm of the shipping forecast is its simplicity, a few sentences about the area you're interested in that have been written by an expert meteorologist based upon their interpretation of what they're seeing on the weather model. For cruising sailors this is generally enough, you have enough information to decide if it's too hazardous to want to go out, or lacking wind so you won't be able to sail and a good idea of what wind direction will be and how it will change. The main issue is it only gives you 24hrs + 24hrs outlook (48 hrs in all but second 24hrs less detail) so if you want a view of what will be happening over the next week you need other sources. Also for the racing sailor you want more detail about wind directions and speeds to effectively plan your tactics.

The shipping forecast is also easily received all around the UK and offshore from the UK coast, it's transmitted on VHF radio. Getting up to date gribs requires an internet connection, mobile signal is pretty decent up to a few miles offshore I find but half way across the channel or the north sea you've got VHF only (or expensive satellite internet) so the shipping forecast on the VHF on passage lets you know if the weather remains as expected or if there's been a sudden change and you need to change your plans or prepare for some heavy weather.

Edit: I should also say the shipping forecast/inshores forecast is available in a minimal text-only form on the met office website, often I'll just read the text (handy for patchy or expensive internet connections) it is fairly rare for me to actually listen to it on the radio.

I live within 20 miles of the coast. I'll often listen to it last thing, or pick up the shipping forecast from the Met Office site. The fixed length and wording means you know when to take notice better than chatty general forecasts.

It gives an awful lot of info that's simply not in general forecasts and apps. Specialised apps can go the other way and give way too much. You mention flying, back when I used to fly a little I found it's a heck of a lot more friendly than decoding METARs, so it's a good starting point if thinking of flying next day. The main thing missing is cloudbase - that's easy, poke your head out the door. :)

It's funny you mention it putting people to sleep because on BBC Radio 4, the late Shipping Forecast is immediately followed by a rather rousing rendition of the National Anthem.

I hear of people listening to the Shipping Forecast and falling asleep, only to be woken up again by the National Anthem.

I have heard it on a trawler out in the North Sea - admittedly about 30 years ago. The radio had the advantage that they could play the audio over the onboard PA system so everyone onboard could hear it.

Yes, many recreational sailors will listen to this. Although GRIBs or other data is available this is a forecast from forecasters rather then model data. The same information is broadcast on VHF working channels at a similar time. It's also broadcast on longwave radio so available further out to sea then FM.

I could be wrong, but I believe that long wave radio was a greater range than vhf, which would be the main alternative source of weather info as internet is very expensive offshore. So for some recreational sailors it would be useful.

FM/VHF is barely better than line of sight and doesn't even go around hills too well. Range is about 25 miles or so. LW will manage over 1,000 miles on a good day.

Radio 4 still broadcasts on long wave as well as FM, which I assume is helpful for ships far out at sea.

Interesting. The forecast overlaps with the Swedish one, which starts in the west with South Utsire, Fisher and German Bight and then continues into the Baltic Sea counter-clockwise. I recall Dogger is mentioned sometimes but could not hear it today. Example: https://sverigesradio.se/topsy/ljudfil/srse/6575657.mp3

Current San Francisco aviation weather report:

    KSFO 261856Z 30018KT 10SM FEW008 16/12 A3002 RMK AO2 SLP165 T01610117

Very nice day.

Les Barker may have made the best forecast, either properly https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G9QumF93PpY or by the professional idiot himself https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6ywku0lQYNc

The Shipping Forecast always reminds me of the scene in Ken Loach's 'Kes': https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9LCod-iVNHM

"Fisher, German Bight, Cromarty. I like to hear it every night Sir, I like names"

The shipping forecast is the one thing that could help me get to sleep as a child.

To this day, I have no idea what it all meant, but I loved the repetitive, rhythmic nature of the words in my ears.

The shipping forecast was a topic in the meditation app I am using (Calm) and I loved it. Definitely qualifies as great rhythmic sleep aid without being distracting :)

That's read by the guy they're interviewing in the podcast :)

Loved this show and have listened to this forecast for years.

He had been around for a long time and they wanted to get some fresh faces in the building

How is this not an age discrimination lawsuit?

They said they wanted someone "new" not someone "younger".

He actually "retired" in 2001, eight years before this incident. He was only doing freelance spots on the BBC until the 2009 slip up, so he didn't actually work for the BBC as an employee at that point.

https://www.theguardian.com/media/2009/sep/15/radio-4-contin...

Oh the BBC have done this sort of thing many, many times... and they always get away with it.

Expected to rock all!

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