RM: The story of how Charlie’s favorite radio program came to be, begins in the 1850s with a man named FitzRoy.ĬC: It goes back to Admiral Robert Fitzroy who was the captain of The Beagle, Charles Darwin’s ship.
RM: OK, Charlie is really into the Shipping Forecast. RM: Charlie is pretty into the Shipping Forecast.ĬC: I’ve no direct connection to the sea, yet I’ve got this lifelong love for the shipping forecast and I’m kind of embarrassed to be saying this, but I have my alarm set every morning to go off at twenty past five in time for that early morning shipping forecast. I’m a writer and occasional radio presenter and I’ve written a number of travel books including Attention All Shipping: A Journey ‘Round the Shipping Forecast People regard it as poetry.ĬC: My name’s Charlie Connolly. RM: But he got through it, and from that day forward Peter Jefferson’s job, which he would keep for forty years until he made a fateful mistake, was to read one of the oldest, strangest, most beloved weather forecasts in the world.ĬC: It’s been going for 104 years now, and it’s become a really part of the culture here and it’s it’s a much loved institution. PJ: Originally I was reading what’s there and wondering to myself, “What the hell is all this about?” RM: So he just read the script, word for word. And when I was faced with it and nobody told me how I should go about reading it, I was somewhat nervous.
PJ: Although I’d heard it since I was a small boy, I never thought that one day I’d be reading it. But one day they handed him a very different sort of script It was the Shipping Forecast. He was an announcer, which meant he read the news. RM: Peter started working for the BBC back in the 60s. I used to work for the BBC for about a lifetime and a half, and one of the things I did there was to read the Shipping Forecast. RM: And that voice you hear reading it is Peter Jefferson Southwest 4 or five increasing 5 or 6 occasionally 7 later occasional rain moderate or good. RM: This cryptic, mesmerizing mumbo-jumbo is the Shipping Forecast, the UK’s nautical weather report. Rain or showers moderate or good, occasionally poor. PJ: Viking North Utsire Southwesterly 5 to 7. RM: Four times every day, on radios all across the British Isles, a BBC announcer begins reading from a seemingly indecipherable script. PJ: And now the shipping forecast issued by the Met Office on behalf of the Maritime and Coastguard Agency at double 015 on Monday the 21st of September.
RM: And now 99% Invisible, I’m Roman Mars.
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