The Shipping Forecast on Radio 4, 100 years old this October, seems to have achieved the impossible. Few people know the places it reports on when it gives the weather conditions in its 31 regions. Almost no one understands the finer points of what it’s telling them – about wind force and direction, atmospheric pressure, or visibility out at sea. Not many working people are even awake at the times it’s broadcast in the early hours. Yet you feel that if the BBC ever tried to cancel it, there would be a revolution.

Its very opacity is part of its charm, as well as the vivid but workaday metaphors it supplies us with

Few radio programmes have a more enduring place in the nation’s psyche; it’s inspired songs by Blur, Radiohead and Wire, poems by Seamus Heaney and Carol Ann Duffy, and has appeared (or been talked about) in films like Ken Loach’s Kes or Terence Davies’ Distant Voices, Still Lives. Olivia Colman, while filming The Crown, even said she periodically had it piped through on an earpiece, to maintain the correct stiff upper lip as the Queen. The Shipping Forecast, it seems, is an integral part of us, yet we don’t really know why.

Is it just the semi-mystical incantation of those names – Cromarty, Lundy, Shannon, Rockall, Malin Head – the words evocative but somehow unconnected with anything we know? Perhaps the forecast, as BBC announcer Chris Aldridge put it, is ‘something that defines us as an island nation… that binds us........

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