Listeners will be treated to some familiar voices who will drop in throughout the day to share historic shipping forecasts along with their personal memories…
Kickstarting 2025, BBC Radio 4 will celebrate the centenary of the Shipping Forecast being broadcast on the BBC with a full day of special programming on New Year’s Day.
Director of Speech and Radio 4 Controller Mohit Bakaya:
“The Shipping Forecast is one of our national treasures. So I’m delighted that we are cracking a bottle against the hull to launch 100 years of the Shipping Forecast on the BBC with a special schedule of programming on New Year’s Day.”
Star of Gavin and Stacey, Ruth Jones, will take to the airwaves in character as the inimitable Nessa. Speaking about her own fondness for the forecast as well as Nessa’s, Ruth said “Nessa has got quite a colourful history and one of her jobs was on the high seas. The Shipping Forecast was always very important and useful to her”.
Ambridge’s very own loveable rogue Eddie Grundy – voiced by Trevor Harrison – from The Archers will read the forecast from 21 November 2021, the date on which Eddie and Clarrie renewed their wedding vows. Meanwhile Dame Ellen MacArthur, no stranger to the Shipping Forecast, brings her own sailing expertise to Radio 4 reading the forecast from 1 June 1995 – the day she set off her Round Britain trip and her first solo adventure.
Julie Hesmondhalgh (Coronation Street), Stephen Fry (Blackadder) and Line of Duty regular Adrian Dunbar will also try their hand at reading historic forecasts, along with comedian Paul Sinha (The Chase), poet Imtiaz Dharker and writers Ian McMillan and Val McDermid. Also reading the Shipping Forecast is Blur frontman Damon Albarn, who famously took creative inspiration from the ships for Blur’s track ‘This Is a Low’.
Elsewhere in the schedule, The Shipping Postcards sees five members of the Radio 4 Continuity team – and the everyday the voices of the Shipping Forecast – set off to discover some of the iconic areas we only know by their official descriptions on the daily forecast – Lundy, Dogger, Forth, Irish Sea, Wight. They will travel across the UK and share audio postcards from their destinations to help us conjure the places we often hear referenced only for their weather.
Documentary A Beginner’s Guide, presented by Paddy O’Connell, will explore the maritime history of the forecast. To mark 100 years of the Shipping Forecast, the historian Jerry Brotton presents an Archive on 4 exploring how Britain is shaped by its maritime past, even now the ships have gone.
In A Haven, BBC Radio 4 cross the world to meet the people who find comfort in the most intimate moment of the Radio 4 schedule: The late-night Shipping Forecast, a prelude to the close-down of the station, read every night at 00:48. And Sea Like a Mirror will be an atmospheric gathering storm of a documentary exploring the extraordinary history of the Beaufort Scale – a system designed to help find language for the wind.
Regular Radio 4 programmes will join the celebrations with Soul Music sharing stories of Sailing By. Front Row will be celebrating the Shipping Forecast through literature, sound and music recorded in front of an audience from beneath the hull of the world famous Cutty Sark in Greenwich.
40 years after the Penlee lifeboat disaster, Solomon Browne is a poetic, drama-documentary, weaving together monologue, recorded testimonies and the genuine radio communications from the disaster. Meanwhile bestselling and award-winning Irish author Nuala O’Connor returns with Seaborne, an intimate and thrilling portrayal of the life of 18th-century pirate, Anne Bonny.
Director of Speech and Radio 4 Controller Mohit Bakaya:
“As well as providing crucial information for sea farers over the years, the Shipping Forecast is also a cherished ritual that distils the essence of Radio 4 for so many of our listeners. It is also a moment for those great, unsung heroes and heroines of the Radio 4 schedule – the Continuity Announcers – to shine. On Jan 1st, we will celebrate our “national poem” with a dedicated day of fascinating programmes for listeners from Bailey to Viking, Biscay to South Utsire and everywhere in between.”
