24 August: The Shipping Forecast

Today, the British institution known as the Shipping Forecast celebrates its anniversary.

1. What is it? Basically, it's a weather report and forecast for the seas around the British Isles. The Met Office produces it, and it is broadcast four times a day (0520, 1754, 2101 and 0048) on BBC Radio 4.
2. Why Radio 4? Because it is broadcast on longwave and can therefore be clearly received at sea all around the British Isles regardless of weather conditions. Before Radio 4 existed, it was broadcast in the BBC National Programme until the Second World War, and after that on the BBC Light Programme (which became Radio 2). In November 1978, Radio 4 took over Radio 2's longwave frequency and with it, the Shipping Forecast.
3. It started in 1867 as a series of messages sent by telegraph to harbour towns to warn them when a storm was coming. Since 1859, when the steam clipper Royal Charter was wrecked in a strong storm off Anglesey and many people died, there had been efforts to communicate storm warnings to shipping, pioneered by Robert FitzRoy who was the captain of Charles Darwin's Beagle and later became an admiral. It wasn't a success at first, and FitzRoy became depressed and frustrated. This coupled with his own financial troubles and poor health, drove him to suicide. He didn't live to see his efforts bear fruit, but he does have a sea area named after him.
4. There are 31 sea areas. Many of them are named after coastal features like estuaries (eg. Forth, Tyne, Thames), islands (eg. Wight, Lundy and Hebrides), towns (eg. Dover, Plymouth) and sandbanks (eg. Forties, Dogger and Bailey). German Bight is an indentation on the Northern European shoreline. Rockall and Fastnet are both named after islets. Malin is named after Malin Head, the northernmost point of Ireland. Biscay is named after the Bay of Biscay, and Trafalgar after Cape Trafalgar.
5. The sea areas have changed a little since the early days. Forties, Humber, Dogger, Thames, Wight, Shannon and Hebrides are the only names from the original list still included. Minches was absorbed into Hebrides in 1983; North and South Utsire were added in 1984;and, in 2002, Finisterre became FitzRoy, after the admiral mentioned above. Finisterre comes from the Latin meaning “the end of the earth”, dating back to when people thought the world was flat and any ship going beyond Finisterre would sail off the end of the Earth. The re-naming didn't go down well with the listening public - there was an outcry but the decision was implemented anyway.
6. A piece of music is played before the 0048 broadcast. The piece is called Sailing By and it was written by Ronald Binge in 1962. The purpose of the music is to ensure the Shipping Forecast starts at exactly the same time each night, even if the programming on Radio 4 is running late.
7. There are strict rules about the Shipping Forecast. It can only be 350 words long (although the 0048 edition has 380 because it includes Trafalgar) and takes nine or ten minutes to read. That's why it sounds so cryptic to anyone who has never done a sailing course. For example, "In the English Channel, there are strong winds, followed by a stronger wind in less than twelve hours time with some light rain, but good visibility" is reduced to "Dover, Wight, Portland, Plymouth, four or five, increasing six soon, rain or slight drizzle, good". It always begins with the words "And now the Shipping Forecast, issued by the Met Office on behalf of the Maritime and Coastguard Agency at xxxx today." (although some announcers use the date instead of "today". The numbers refer to the Beaufort Scale of wind strength. Imminent means within 6 hours, soon between 6 and 12, and later means after 12 hours. Good, moderate and poor refer to visibility; veering means the wind is changing in a clockwise direction; backing means anti-clockwise. The forecast works clockwise around the 31 areas, from the North of Britain.
8. The forecast is surprisingly popular, listened to regularly by hundreds of thousands of people, many of whom don't even need to know what the weather is going to be like at sea. Strictly speaking, ships don't need it so much these days as they all have forecasting technology on board, but they still listen to check their instruments are working properly. Why do people on land, who often don't even understand the jargon, listen, though? Many people say the soothing voice of the announcer saying familiar words helps them fall asleep, a bit like a bedtime story for grownups. It has been described as being like poetry, or a lullaby; or that it reminds us Brits that we are an island nation with a proud seafaring past; or that it transports you to an exotic faraway place, or makes a person feel safe tucked up in bed while mariners are out there coping with the storms. You realise just how popular it is when a plan to change the broadcast time in 1995, by just 12 minutes, caused such an outcry that there were debates in Parliament about it and the plan was scrapped.
9. It's such an institution that it has been mentioned in dozens of songs, films and TV shows. Blur, Wire, Radiohead, The Prodigy and Jethro Tull have all recorded songs which reference the Shipping Forecast and some of its areas. On TV, in Keeping Up Appearances, Hyacinth phones the Met Office for the shipping forecast before visiting a yacht which is moored on the Thames; and Howard and Hilda in Ever Decreasing Circles use the need to get home in time for it as an excuse to leave a party. In the film and book, Kes, the protagonist calls out "German Bight" as the teacher is calling the register, and calls the name of a classmate, "Fisher" - because German Bight follows Fisher in the forecast. An extract of the Shipping Forecast featured in the opening ceremony of the 2012 Olympics in London and it even trumps Cricket! During an Ashes match in 2011, moments before the final wicket fell and England won, it was time for the Shipping Forecast - so the live broadcast of the cricket was cut. By the time the cricket broadcast resumed, the match was over.
10. The forecast was taken off air during both world wars, and it was temporarily taken off air for two years in 1993 - causing an outcry, needless to say. Otherwise, it has been on at the same times every day except in 2014, when something went horribly wrong, and even though there was someone reading the forecast, it wasn't broadcast. Thousands of complaints ensued. It has only been broadcast on TV once, in 1993 as part of the Arena Radio Night, when BBC Radio 4 and BBC 2 set up a simultaneous broadcast. Other than that, it's only on TV as a recording used during the closing credits of Rick Stein's Rick Stein’s Seafood Lover’s Guide. There's even a Twitter feed, but that hasn't been updated since 2014. In the 1983 children’s cartoon The Adventures of Portland Bill, many of the characters are named after features in the Shipping Forecast.

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Over the Rainbow

'We're not in Trinity anymore,' says Leonard Marx, quoting a line from an old Innovian  movie. The moon is different; the planes flying overhead are different. Nobody has any idea where they are or if it's possible to get home. 

In this strange new world, people from the highly technical Innovia and the less advanced Classica must co-operate in order to survive. In addition, travel through the inter-dimensional wormhole has given some people unusual and unexpected powers.

Innovia mourns the loss of its superhero, Power Blaster, last seen carrying a nuclear bomb to the upper atmosphere away from the inhabited Bird Island. They don't believe he could possibly have survived.  Power Blaster has survived, but is close to death and stranded in the new dimension. He is nursed back to health by a Classican woman, Elena. She has no idea who he is, only that she is falling in love with the handsome stranger.  

Shanna sets out to discover what happened to Nathan Tate, who didn't return from his hiking holiday, not knowing her life is about to be turned inside out and upside down. 

Meanwhile, Desi Troyes, the man responsible for the catastrophe, is at large on the new world, plotting how he can transfer his plans for world domination to the planet he now finds himself on - Earth. 

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