Episode description

Samira Ahmed presents Front Row's contribution to Radio 4's New Year's Day celebration of the Shipping Forecast, marking a century since the BBC began broadcasting it. This edition of the arts programme explores how the Shipping Forecast inspires musicians, writers, artists of all kinds, and how it has become a powerful presence in the psyche of the nation, even among people with no connection to the sea. There is an irony here: the forecast is factual, devoid of metaphor, yet it moves millions emotionally.

Recorded in front of an audience at Britain's most famous ship, the Cutty Sark, Samira's guests are novelist Meg Clothier, author of The Shipping Forecast: Celebrating 100 Years; musicians Lisa Knapp and Gerry Diver; poets Sean Street and Zaffar Kunial; and Paddy Rodgers, Director of Royal Museums, Greenwich. They discuss the inspirational quality of the Shipping Forecast - the litany of names of sea areas, its rhythms, the factual yet evocative vocabulary of atmospheric and sea states, and how this vital information, demanding attention, has become a national lullaby.

Sean Street, Britain's first Professor of Radio and author of several books about sound, considers the Shipping Forecast as a sound work, and reads his poem, Shipping Forecast, Donegal. Lisa Knapp performs, accompanied by Gerry Diver, her song 'Shipping Song' and 'Three Score and Ten', written by William Delf, a Grimsby fisherman, after a disastrous storm in 1889. There are two world premieres, commissioned by Front Row, an audio piece by the sound designer, Ross Burns, and a poem by Zaffar Kunial. And some quirky Shipping Forecast moments such as Alan Bennett reading it and Charlotte Green assaying the Forecast - in Arabic.

Presenter: Samira Ahmed Producer: Julian May