What’s occurring with the Shipping Forecast? The Gavin and Stacey star Ruth Jones is to read the seafarers’ bulletin to celebrate a centenary of the shipping news on the BBC.
It will be Jones’s last performance in her Gavin and Stacey role as no-nonsense Nessa after the sitcom’s triumphant Christmas finale. Gavin and Stacey won the festive TV ratings war with 12.3 million viewers, becoming the most watched programme on Christmas Day for 16 years.
Jones is among several celebrities who will read the forecast on New Year’s Day to mark the anniversary of the programme.
The Shipping Forecast has been described as a daily prose poem and even a national epic with its repeated strange phrases such as “falling more slowly” to describe pressure, or “backing south-westerly” to describe wind.
Jones suggested she will read it in character, raising the prospect of her catchphrase “tidy” being temporarily added to the Shipping Forecast lexicon.
She said: “Nessa has got quite a colourful history and one of her jobs was on the high seas. The Shipping Forecast was always very important and useful to her.”
In the final episode of Gavin and Stacey on Christmas Day, Neil “Smithy” Smith (James Corden) stopped Nessa from going back to work on the ships by racing to Southampton dock. In the penultimate scene he proposed to Nessa on a boat.
The actors Julie Hesmondhalgh, Stephen Fry and Line of Duty’s Adrian Dunbar, and the sailor Dame Ellen MacArthur are also among those to celebrate the first broadcast of the Met Office’s forecast on the BBC in October 1925.
Blur’s frontman Damon Albarn is also due to appear on a programme to mark the celebrations. Blur’s track This Is a Low is one of many creative works inspired by the Shipping Forecast.
The comedian Paul Sinha, the poet Imtiaz Dharker and the writers Ian McMillan and Val McDermid will also read forecasts.
Trevor Harrison, who plays Eddie Grundy in The Archers, will read the forecast from 21 November 2021 – the date when his character and Clarrie Grundy (Heather Bell) renewed their wedding vows.
MacArthur will read the forecast from 1 June 1995 – the day she set off on her round-Britain trip and her first solo adventure.
The Radio 4 controller and director of speech, Mohit Bakaya, said: “The Shipping Forecast is one of our national treasures. So I’m delighted that we are cracking a bottle against the hull to launch 100 years of the Shipping Forecast on the BBC with a special schedule of programming on New Year’s Day.
“As well as providing crucial information for seafarers over the years, the Shipping Forecast is also a cherished ritual that distils the essence of Radio 4 for so many of our listeners. It is also a moment for those great, unsung heroes and heroines of the Radio 4 schedule – the continuity announcers – to shine.
“On January 1, we will celebrate our ‘national poem’ with a dedicated day of fascinating programmes for listeners from Bailey to Viking, Biscay to South Utsire and everywhere in between.”
The BBC presenter Paddy O’Connell will present a documentary about the history of the forecast, called A Beginner’s Guide, as the historian Jerry Brotton presents an Archive on 4 that will explore how Britain is shaped by its maritime past.
The Shipping Forecast is produced by the Met Office on behalf of the Maritime and Coastguard Agency. This year marked its centenary, after first being heard on 1 January 1924 as a weather bulletin called Weather Shipping. It moved a year later to the BBC.