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The Shipping Forecast is a four-times-daily BBC radio broadcast of weather reports and forecasts for the seas around the coasts of Britain and Ireland.

It is produced by the UK Meteorological Office (part of MOD) and broadcast by BBC Radio 4 on behalf of the Maritime and Coastguard Agency (part of Department for Transport).

The forecasts sent over the Navtex system use a similar format, and the same sea areas.

Because of its unique and distinctive sound, the broadcasts have an appeal beyond those solely interested in nautical weather. The waters around the British Isles are divided into sea areas, also known as weather areas (see map below) and many listeners find the well-known repetition of the names of the sea areas almost hypnotic, particularly during the bedtime (for Britain) broadcast at 0048 GMT. It is regarded with iconic affection by many listeners, and in Britain is the butt of many affectionate jokes.

Influences on Popular Culture

Due to its set rhythm, calm enunciation, and list of characteristic names from around Britain, the Shipping Forecast can sound quite poetic when broadcast. It is perhaps not surprising that it has featured in songs and poetry as a result.

"This Is a Low" on Blur's album Parklife includes the lyrics:

On the Tyne, Forth and Cromarty
There's a low in the high Forties

The song also contains references to Biscay, Dogger, Thames ("Hit traffic on the Dogger bank / Up the Thames to find a taxi rank") and Malin.

Radiohead uses lyrics relating to the Shipping Forecast in its song "In Limbo" to represent a theme of being lost:

Lundy, Fastnet, Irish Sea
I've got a message I can't read

The Young Punx sampled the shipping forecast as read by BBC presenter Alan Smith for their track "Rockall". The shipping forecast forms the entire lyric for the track, both used in its original form (yet rhyming and scanning) e.g. "Tyne, Dogger, German Bight. Humber, Thames, Dover, Wight" and also with the words re-edited into new orders to form new meanings and puns such as "expected to, Rock All, by midnight tonight".

Frank Muir and Denis Norden parodied the Shipping Forecast in a song written for an episode of Take It From Here:

In Ross and Finisterre
The outlook is sinisterre
Rockall and Lundy
Will clear up by Monday

Other popular artists who have used samples of the Shipping Forecast include Andy White who added the forecast to the track "The Whole Love Story" to create a very nostalgic, cosy and soporific sound, highly evocative of the British Isles; Tears for Fears, whose track "Pharaohs" (a play on the name of the sea area "Faeroes") is a setting of the forecast to a mixture of mellow music and sound effects; and Thomas Dolby, who included a shipping forecast read by BBC's John Marsh on the track "Windpower". "The Good Ship Lifestyle", a track on the album Tubthumper by Chumbawumba, starts out with a listing of the sea areas — in the wrong order, however. British DJ Rob Overseer's album Wreckage has a final track entitled "Heligoland," where the Shipping Forecast surrealistically alternates between reporting the weather and the emotional states of an individual. The band British Sea Power entitled a b-side of their Please Stand Up single "Gales Warnings in Viking North". Beck includes a 27-second sample five minutes into the track "The Horrible Fanfare, Landslide, Exoskeleton" on the album "The Information". Experimental electronic musician Robin Storey, recording under the name Rapoon, sampled the shipping forecast for the track "Falling More Slowly" on the album Easterly 6 or 7.

The Jethro Tull track, North Sea Oil features the shipping forecast in between verses. The track is on the Stormwatch album.

Seamus Heaney wrote a sonnet "The Shipping Forecast", which opens:

Dogger, Rockall, Malin, Irish Sea:
Green, swift upsurges, North Atlantic flux
Conjured by that strong gale-warming voice,
Collapse into a sibilant penumbra.

The Carol Ann Duffy poem "Prayer" finishes with the lines:

Darkness outside. Inside, the radio's prayer —
Rockall. Malin. Dogger. Finisterre.

A recitation of the Shipping Forecast by actor Peter Serafinowicz features prominently in the Black Books episode "The Big Lock-Out".

The Shipping Forecast has also inspired writing, painting and photographic collections, notably Charlie Connelly's Attention All Shipping: A Journey Round The Shipping Forecast, Mark Power and David Chandler's The Shipping Forecast, and Peter Collyer's Rain Later, Good. Their critical and commercial success is a tribute both to the time and energy people are willing to invest in artistic projects inspired by the shipping forecast, and the warmth with which the public regard this regular radio announcement.

In the BBC TV show As Time Goes By, the housekeeper of the house in Hampshire (Mrs Bale) occasionally mentions the Shipping Forecast.

Geoff Lloyd's show on Virgin Radio includes a feature called The Shitting Forecast, in which listeners are invited to call in and say what they have eaten during the day, and their bowel movements are predicted in the style of the Shipping Forecast.

Dead Ringers parodied the Shipping Forecast using Brian Perkins rapping the forecast. Many other versions have been used including a "Dale Warning" to warn where Dale Winton could be found over the coming period.

Gavin Bryars's "A Man In A Room, Gambling" (1997), was written on a commission from BBC Radio 3. The ten shorts work was played on Radio 3 without any introductory announcements, and Bryars is quoted as saying that he hoped they would appear to the listener in a similar way to the shipping forecast, both mysterious and accepted without question. Bryars's music is heard beneath monologues in a the same format of the forecasts.

Terence Davies' film Distant Voices, Still Lives, a largely autobiographical account of growing up in Liverpool during the 1940's and '50's, opens with a shipping forecast from this period.

In the book A Kestrel for a Knave and its film Kes the shipping forecast is featured in the classroom register roll call when lead character Billy Casper calls out German Bight after the teacher reads out the name of a pupil called Fisher. (Author Barry Hines erroneously has Billy then say that Cromarty follows German Bight.)

All the characters in the cartoon The Adventures of Portland Bill were named after shipping areas or coastal weather stations, with two exceptions - Eddy Stone, named after a lighthouse, and Ross, presumably so called as he was the best friend of the character Cromarty (a former Scottish county was called Ross & Cromarty).

There is three-bell change ringing method named "Shipping Forecast Singles". It was composed by Sam Austin and was rung to a peal in 2004 at St John the Baptist, Middleton, Warwickshire. Other three-bell methods by the same composer are named after various shipping areas.

Stephen Fry, in his 1988 radio programme Saturday Night Fry, issued the following "Shipping Forecast" in the first episode of the programme:

"And now, before the news and weather, here is the Shipping Forecast issued by the Meteorological Office at 1400 hours Greenwich Mean Time.
Finisterre, Dogger, Rockall, Bailey: no.
Wednesday, variable, imminent, super.
South Utsire, North Utsire, Sheer Ness, Foulness, Elliot Ness:
If you will, often, eminent, 447, 22 yards, touchdown, stupidly.
Malin, Hebrides, Shetland, Jersey, Fair Isle, Turtle-Neck, Tank Top, Cortelle:
Blowy, quite misty, sea sickness. Not many fish around, come home, veering suggestively.
That was the Shipping Forecast for 1700 hours, Wednesday the 18th of August."