Friday 4 July marks 100 years since the first broadcast of the Shipping Forecast on BBC radio on 4 July 1925.
To mark the occasion, Jarvis Cocker has recorded a special shipping forecast to be broadcast for an audience at the Crossed Wires Podcast Festival in Sheffield. The festival will welcome ‘ships’ fans to a special 100th anniversary programme with Radio 4 announcers Lisa Costello and Viji Alles, hosted by Chris Mason. The session is part of BBC Sounds’ free Fringe festival with live podcast recordings and exclusive sessions, open to the public.
Just two days before Pulp, aka Patchwork, were wowing crowds with a surprise performance at Glastonbury, Cocker was quietly nestled in the BBC Radio 4 studio, reflecting on his love for the Shipping Forecast.
Cocker says: “The Shipping Forecast is something you absorb unconsciously if you live in the UK. It’s been on the airwaves for over 100 years… Now technically speaking, it’s a weather guide designed to help sailors on the high seas. But it helps people navigate in other ways than that. For instance, for insomniacs, it’s a mantra that hopefully helps them drift finally off to sleep.”
He says: “I think it’s known around the world as a go-to chill-out thing – before chill-out things were invented, probably.”
The Shipping Forecast is preceded by a piece of music called Sailing By. Cocker notably chose this track as one of the eight he would take to a desert island when he appeared on Radio 4’s Desert Island Discs in 2005.
Cocker says: “When you listen to Sailing By, it really does feel like life is drifting past you in an extremely pleasant way. A handy go-to sedative to have to hand if you ever happen to become a castaway – or get cut off from normal life for any other reason.”
Cocker used to listen whilst going to sleep, citing that “the repetitive nature” and “the soothing nature of the person who reads it” helped him to drop off.
“I think it’s because it’s a routine”, he adds, “it’s on every day, so it’s something that you can rely on. It’s on at a set time, so it gives a bit of stability. And if the rest of your life isn’t that stable, it can provide some kind of stability for it. Sailing By was a very relaxing piece of music… I know that a lot of people do use it for that kind of relaxing, almost ‘meditation-like’ thing.”
When asked why he felt the Shipping Forecast was still important, he said: “I think because even though sometimes it’s talking about bad weather conditions and storms and stuff, it’s actually an oasis of calm in the day. There’s no musical backing to it, it’s just a human voice talking to you. Some words, which you don’t really know what they mean at all, but the sound of it is comforting and will put you into a nice place.”
Cocker said some of his favourite place names include, German Bight – “for some reason I always think of a cocktail sausage there. I suppose it’s because a frankfurter cocktail sausage is a small frank.” – and Hebrides – “I’ve actually been to the Hebrides, so that conjures up some kind of real image.”
Imagining how the Shipping Forecast might sound in another 100 years, Cocker gave us his best robot impression, suggesting: “It may be a robot who is saying “north to northwesterly, occasionally poor.” I hope not. I think it would be better to keep it as a person. Who knows? We don’t know what the world’s going to look like in 100 years, or whether people will even be in it. If people are still in it, it might all be water. So everybody will be listening to it. It’d be like the number one programme, because everybody will be in a boat. Kevin Costner will be hailed as a seer who knew that we would all become a Water world one day. I don’t know. I hope it is. I wouldn’t be around to hear it anyway.”
The Shipping Forecast is produced by the Met Office on behalf of the Maritime and Coastguard Agency (MCA) as part of the UK’s statutory obligations to provide Maritime Safety Information to seafarers via approved broadcasting methods. The Shipping Forecast is also shared with the BBC for its own broadcast.
An online journey through the one-hundred-year history of the Shipping Forecast can be found on the BBC History website.
Special anniversary programmes from BBC Radio 4 are available now on BBC Sounds, including The Shipping Forecast: A Beginners Guide with Paddy O’Connell, The Shipping Postcards from continuity announcers, Archive on 4 – The Shipping Forecast at 100: Shipshaped and Soul Music: Sailing By.
PS