Why the Shipping Forecast remains a British institution

As the BBC Radio 4 broadcast marks its centenary, find out why it remains so compelling and put your knowledge to the test with our quiz

It has a lyrical cadence that is strangely comforting, and yet speaks of wilderness and peril. It has been the backing track to our lives, spanning two generations, and even if the words mean nothing to many, the meaning is obvious to all – we are an island nation, beset on all sides by a heaving ocean. The Shipping Forecast, which is 100 years old this week, is broadcast four times a day on Radio 4 – as regular as the tides themselves – and is a celebration of our splendid isolation off the coast of Western Europe. 
And, to this day, it saves lives. In an age of satellite forecasts and weather websites, those who know – who really know – still tune in to hear its solemn intonation (“There are warnings of gales in Rockall, Malin, Hebrides, Bailey, and Fair Isle…”) and, as a consequence, secure a weathered hatch or take an extra turn of braided line around a winch. 
I must confess an interest here, a very personal investment. As a relatively new sailor, a freshly minted day skipper venturing out with my young family, there is nothing quite like the combination of two great institutions – the Met Office and the BBC – to reassure that all is well. In the restless world of the Atlantic, everyone seeks a constant, a trusted prophet, and in doing so asks for permission to proceed. This broadcast, above all others, provides it.   
To describe in practical terms something so deeply evocative seems strangely reductive, but the structure of the forecast is an essential part of its make up, a rhythmic familiarity that makes it compelling.
Each forecast lasts precisely 10 minutes and follows exactly the same format: first, the gale warnings – a portent of imminent and life-threatening storms – then a general synopsis, and then a region-by-region tour of the coastline of the United Kingdom, Ireland, and beyond – as far south as Trafalgar off the Portuguese coast, all the way up to Southern Iceland, 1,900 miles further north. 
Each of these 31 individual segments – split into wind direction and strength, precipitation, and then visibility – have their own beat, their own patois; veering, backing, good, poor, rising and falling, with each detail making up the poetic whole.
The names of the regions covered by the forecast are a celebration of our maritime heritage. Trafalgar, Finisterre, Fair Isle, Viking, and perhaps most pertinently of all, Fitzroy. A great maritime hero, a colossus, now immortalised in a restless patch of vast, grey ocean west of Biscay. Robert FitzRoy skippered HMS Beagle around the globe, changing the world view of a young Charles Darwin in the process. He established the Meteorological Office, which led in turn to the Shipping Forecast as a sentinel of the troubled, shifting, unpredictable seas on which he sailed. It is as good a metaphor as any for the man himself, who took his own life in 1874 to still the restless ghosts within.
Perhaps a measure of the enduring power of the forecast lies in the songs, poems, and great works it has inspired. No one summarised this better than Seamus Heaney, whose poem The Shipping Forecast perfectly encapsulates each broadcast, a life or death missive emanating from crackling, tinny radio sets, as rain lashes the window panes behind the oil lamp flicker of fishing villages along the Irish coast:
“Midnight and closedown. Sirens of the tundra, 
Of eel-road, seal-road, keel-road, whale-road, raise
Their wind-compounded keen behind the baize
And drive the trawlers to the lee of Wicklow.”