The Shipping Forecast

Rockall by Peter Collyer, from his book Rain Later, Good. Used by permission.
Original caption — too small to be read here and so not reproduced — reads:
Rockall
Southerly 4 backing southeasterly then increasing 6 to gale 8 perhaps gale 9.
Showers then rain.
Good becoming moderate.

I’ve mentioned before how the British see themselves as seafarers; you don’t have to look far for web pages such as “The Importance of Ships to Our Island Nation”  or for lines such as  “As an island nation, [the sea] occupies a special place in our national psyche.”

Admittedly, Britain doesn’t have a good climate for grass skirts, nor exotic native plants for making flowery leis—though we can make a mean daisy chain over here—but the British are islanders nonetheless, and life for many people here depends on what the British call the sea and Americans would more usually call the ocean.  However you refer to it, it can be treacherously changeable.  To keep tabs on what the sea is doing, mariners turn to BBC Radio 4 for the Shipping Forecast on FM or long wave several times a day, but the one I’m familiar with is at 0048 (12 minutes to 1:00 in the morning).  It’s the first one of the day, I suppose, but we landlubbers think of it as the last one.  The Shipping Forecast is like a bedtime story; we go to sleep with it.

So when the Shipping Forecast faded into Elgar’s “Nimrod” at the opening ceremony of the Olympics, I knew that the production that evening was going to be about ordinary, everyday Britain—the real Britain as I know it.  The lines they used were:

…24 hours.  North Utsire, South Utsire, Forties, Cromarty, Forth.  Mainly easterly or northeasterly 4, occasionally 5.  Fog patches. Moderate, occasionally very poor.  Tyne, Dogger, Fisher, German Bight, Humber, Thames, Dover. North or northeast 4 or 5, occasionally 6.  Fog patches. Moderate, occasionally very poor.  Wight, Portland…

Sea Areas.
(Map from Wikipedia, used under the Creative Commons license.)

The numbers give the strength of the wind on the Beaufort scale, moderate and poor refer to visibility, and the names are the names of sea areas, which I’ll get to in a minute.  The information comes from the Met Office, Britain’s official weather service (a modernized name; it used to be the Meteorological Office), but the Shipping Forecast is more than the sum of its data.

The words themselves, given in concise language for brevity and clarity, come across with the compactness and rhythm of poetry. Taken altogether, they  have the comforting repetitive effect of a litany, even when the announcer is calmly warning craft of a force 10 gale.  Elisabeth Mahoney wrote in The Guardian  of the Shipping Forecast’s “talismanic, haunting power”; a recent AP article  called it a “melodic and soothing chant”, “a reminder that even in the jet age, Britain is an island nation where much depends on the movement of the sea.”

So it’s a litany, a chant, and in at least one context, has been likened to prayer; Carol Ann Duffy, one of several poets who’ve used bits of the Shipping Forecast in their work,  puts words from the Forecast at the intersection of poetry and religious incantation.  Duffy, the current poet laureate and the first woman, the first Scot, and the first out gay person to have the title, ends her poem “Prayer” with:

Darkness outside. Inside, the radio’s prayer —

Rockall. Malin. Dogger. Finisterre.

(Read the full poem by clicking here .)

I first heard the shipping forecast long before I visited England—and must have had no idea back then what I was hearing—when Jethro Tull released the album Stormwatch.  In between verses of “North Sea Oil”, you can hear:

Viking, Forties, Fisher. Northwest backing west, 4 or 5.

Dogger, German Bight. Northwest 5 or 6, occasionally gale 8.

There’s a good map of these sea areas on Wikipedia (click here).    The recitation always begins with Viking and then works its way around, mainly clockwise,  in an established order.  I notice that Carol Ann Duffy disrupted that order for her poem even though the names themselves could be taken, as is, to be found poetry ; scholarly articles have actually been written on the Shipping Forecast as poetry.

If you choose a section of the list of sea areas carefully you can even find, without changing the word order, what I like to call found doggerel:

Dogger, Fisher, German Bight,

Humber, Thames, Dover, Wight

Poets may recite the areas out of order for effect, but other changes creep in that might make you think poets were taking even more liberties than they are, because the names of the sea areas sometimes change.  North and South Utsire (pronounced uht-SIH-ruh) were carved out of Viking in 1984; and as recently as 2002, since I’ve lived in the UK,  the more musical Finisterre was renamed Fitzroy.  Both changes were made to  coordinate the British names with those used by other European countries, though I’d put money on the British versions having been established earlier than others.  (Yes, I should look it up, but I’m tired of entering links into this column, sorry.)

A whimsical painting of a paintbrush-wielding puffin listening to the Shipping Forecast, from Rain Later, Good. Original caption reads “And that ends The Shipping Forecast.  The next will be at…” Used by permission of Peter Collyer.

So those are the Shipping Forecast basics.  There are other intricacies, such as that the shipping forecast, at certain times of day, includes notes about the conditions in inshore waters, meaning areas no more than 12 miles from shore.  These include data from coastal [weather] stations, including buoys that function as lighthouses  in waters too deep for building a stationary lighthouse.  So you’ll hear references to, say, observations taken at Sandettie Light Vessel Automatic.

If you wonder about these places—where they are and what they look like—I can recommend the book Rain Later, Good by Peter Collyer.  Mr Collyer is a watercolorist who has traveled to all the sea areas painting seascapes or landscapes-with-sea-coast of each.  You can find his web site under “Featured Links” on the right-hand side of this blog.

Radio 4 signs off every night with the Shipping Forecast, preceded by an orchestra playing a piece in waltz time called “Sailing By” (though I’ve read that was written with hot-air balloon flight in mind), which is sort of horribly wonderful.  It’s sentimental schmaltz—which is probably redundant, but I think my British readers may not be used to the word schmaltz so I had to add sentimental—but has a nostalgic pull that seems to function in this country something like “Happy Trails” does in the US.  The music is convenient because you can fill up time with it or shorten it if you need to, should the preceding programme run short or long, and it’s distinctive—nobody would broadcast that stuff for any other reason—and alerts seafarers that they’ve found the right radio frequency.

After the music, we get the Shipping Forecast complete with inshore waters, a brief weather forecast for those on land, a quick goodnight from whatever presenter is still on duty in what I imagine to be a studio showing the only light in a darkened BBC building, and then the National Anthem.  It feels like being tucked into bed; all’s right with the world.

I’ll sign off now with a complete list of the sea areas.  God Save the Queen.  Sleep well.

Cromarty by Peter Collyer from Rain Later, Good. Used by permission. The original caption reads:
Cromarty
Northerly backing westerly 3 or 4, increasing 6 later.
Showers.
Good.

Viking

North Utsire

South Utsire

Forties

Cromarty

Forth

Tyne

Dogger

Fisher

German Bight

Humber

Thames

Dover

Wight

Portland

Plymouth

Biscay

Trafalgar

FitzRoy (was Finisterre)

Sole

Lundy

Fastnet

Irish Sea

Shannon

Rockall

Malin

Hebrides

Bailey

Fair Isle

Faeroes

Southeast Iceland

Radio 4: Not Just BBC English

Second in a series of posts touching on English accents.

Before we moved to the UK, we used to come here on vacation/holiday every chance we got, rent/hire a car, and drive from stone circle to stone circle and from castle to castle until our time or our money ran out. On one of these trips, twiddling the radio dial in the car, we ran across a comedy improv program/programme that had us laughing so hard we had to pull off the road until the show was over.  We’d stumbled across BBC Radio 4, the BBC’s spoken-word radio station, which fills the airwaves with drama, news, documentaries, readings from books, and lots and lots of comedy.

Before the show was over—it was “I’m Sorry, I Haven’t a Clue”, but the BBC web site doesn’t offer any clips I can link to at the moment—we were fans. As soon as we had a place to live in the UK, we subscribed to the Radio Times, the BBC’s guide to what’s on, launched in 1923 because newspapers refused to carry radio listings, afraid that radio would put them out of business. Back then it only listed BBC programmes, but it now covers radio and television—broadcast, cable, and satellite—from all kinds of providers.

With so much to choose from, it was a good six months before I caught the Radio 4 panel show/comedy game show “Just a Minute”. The Radio Times didn’t make it sound appealing; it listed big-name comedians, sure, but the point was apparently for them to speak on a given topic for a minute. So what?

So funny, that’s what, and sometimes outstandingly hilariously funny. The host gives four panellists a topic, and they have to speak entertainingly for 60 seconds without hesitating, deviating from the subject, or repeating a word they’ve already used, while the other panellists listen for clever ways to catch them out. In the hands of the kind of performers they get it’s great improvisional comedy, but you don’t have to take my word for it, you can listen via the BBC website; the most recent show can be heard here.

As luck would have it, the next-to-most-recent show (as I write this, anyway; I’m referring to episode 4 of series 58) included a round on the topic “My Accent”, and aired just after I posted my last blog piece. I’d mentioned RP and the mainstream use of the pronunciation “samwidges” here, both of which cropped up on the show.

Sheila Hancock (actress and author; widow of John Thaw who played Inspector Morse) spoke about the two years of training at RADA (the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts, a prestigious British acting school) that erased her original Cockney accent and left her speaking Received Pronunciation.

Gyles Brandreth (actor, author, former Member of Parliament) in a different round said “I never forget a face, but I’ll make an exception in your case” and implied he might have been quoting Harpo Marx, until he was challenged on the grounds that Harpo never spoke. Brandreth said the challenger clearly didn’t know Harpo as well as he did, and that Harpo “was quite chatty at home over the samwidges”.

The Harpo challenge came from Paul Merton, who speaks with a working-class London accent. During his turn to extemporize on “My Accent”, he said that in the 1980s someone at the BBC told him that with his voice (meaning accent) he’d never appear on BBC Radio 4. That’s about the same time the BBC moved announcer Susan Rae, who speaks with a Scottish accent, onto Radio 4; rumour has it she got death threats, though I’ve only been able to confirm that there was a neo-nationalist outcry and she got some rather impolite suggestions, the printable ones telling her to go back to Scotland.

Clearly, times have changed. And even though people had strongly negative feelings about non-standard accents on the Beeb as recently as the 1980s, it’s possible that opinion began to change during World War II. Since German propaganda radio broadcasts in English used RP, the BBC began using announcers with non-standard accents so listeners could be sure they were listening to real British news, or so Wikipedia suggests.

I like what Radio 4 offers so much that I don’t much care what accents I hear. I have to discipline myself, or I’d putter around all day listening to the radio and, er, never get my next blog post finished.