Dogger, Fisher

At forty-eight minutes past midnight, on long wave, a voice reads out the weather for thirty-one areas of sea in a fixed order, in about three hundred and fifty words, in a form that contains almost no verbs.

Several hundred thousand people who own no boat listen to it on purpose.

What it is for

The origin is a wreck.

The Royal Charter went down off Anglesey in 1859 with the loss of over four hundred people, in a storm that had been perfectly predictable to anybody with a barometer and the right information. Robert FitzRoy — who had captained the Beagle, taken Darwin round the world, and was by then the head of what became the Met Office — set up a system of storm warnings telegraphed to ports.

That is the ancestor. The BBC began broadcasting a shipping forecast in 1924, and it has been going out ever since, four times a day, prepared by the Met Office for the Maritime and Coastguard Agency.

It is not a heritage item. It is a live safety broadcast, and it is on long wave specifically because long wave carries a very long way over water and gets into places that FM and digital do not.

The form

Everything about the bulletin is determined by the word limit and the need for absolute unambiguity.

It begins with gale warnings, if any. Then the general synopsis — where the pressure systems are and where they are going. Then the areas, in order.

The order is fixed and it is geographical: it starts at Viking, off north-east Scotland, and works clockwise round the British Isles and Ireland. A listener who knows the sequence knows which area is coming next, which means the reader does not have to signpost anything.

For each area, four things in the same order every time: wind, sea state, weather, visibility. Wind direction and force. Then whether the sea is smooth, moderate, rough, very rough, high, very high or phenomenal. Then rain or showers or fair. Then good, moderate, poor, or fog.

No sentences. No connectives. No adjectives that are not defined terms. Every word in it means one thing and has been agreed in advance.

That is why it sounds the way it does, and why it works on a bad radio in a wheelhouse in the dark.

The names

The sea areas are the reason it has escaped its purpose.

Viking, North Utsire, South Utsire, Forties, Cromarty, Forth, Tyne, Dogger, Fisher, German Bight, Humber, Thames, Dover, Wight, Portland, Plymouth, Biscay, Trafalgar, FitzRoy, Sole, Lundy, Fastnet, Irish Sea, Shannon, Rockall, Malin, Hebrides, Bailey, Fair Isle, Faeroes, Southeast Iceland.

They are named after sandbanks, estuaries, islands, headlands and a battle, and the effect of hearing them in sequence — always the same sequence — is closer to a litany than to a weather report.

Finisterre was renamed FitzRoy in 2002, because Spain had an area of the same name in a different place and the potential for confusion was real. There was a small national mourning.

Why people listen

Because it is the only thing left on British radio that is genuinely not addressed to you.

Almost everything broadcast is trying to hold an audience. The shipping forecast is a technical bulletin for people at sea, read at a measured pace because it is being written down at the other end, in a vocabulary designed for accuracy rather than warmth. It does not care whether you are listening.

And it is preceded, before the late one, by ‘Sailing By’ — a piece Ronald Binge wrote in 1963, which exists in the schedule for an entirely practical reason. The forecast has to start at a fixed moment, and whatever came before it will have ended at some unpredictable point, so a piece of music that can be faded in at any bar and run for as long as necessary is required to fill the gap.