99% Invisible - 316- The Shipping Forecast

Episode Date: July 25, 2018

Four times every day, on radios all across the British Isles, a BBC announcer begins reading from a seemingly indecipherable script. "And now the Shipping Forecast issued by the Met Office on behalf of the Maritime and Coastguard Agency," says the voice over the wire. "Viking, North Utsire; southwesterly five to seven; occasionally gale eight; rain or showers; moderate or good, occasionally poor." Cryptic and mesmerizing, this is the UK’s nautical weather report. The Shipping Forecast

And now 99% invisible. I'm Roman Morris. And now the shipping forecast issued by the Met Office on behalf of the Maritime and Coast Guide Agency at 0015 on Monday the 21st of September. Four times every day on radio is all across the British Isles. A BBC announcer begins reading from a seemingly indecisurable script. Viking North-Azeria, southwestally, 527, occasionally gale 8, reinal showers, moderate or good, occasionally poor. This cryptic mesmerizing mumbo jumbo is the shipping forecast, the UK's nautical weather report. Time, doggar, Fisher. Southwest, 405, increasing 5 or 6, occasionally 7 later, occasional rain, moderate, or good. And that voice you hear reading it is Peter Jefferson.

Yes, hello, I'm Peter Jefferson. 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. Peter started working for the BBC back in the 60s. He was an announcer, which meant he read the news. But one day they handed him a very different sort of script. It was the shipping forecast. Well, that had it since I was a small boy. I never thought that one day I'd be reading it. And when I was faced with it and nobody told me how I should go about reading it, I was somewhat nervous. So he just me how I should go about reading it, I was somewhat nervous.

So he just read the script, word for word. Originally I was reading what's there and wondering to myself what the hell is all this about. But he got through it. And from that day forward Peter Jefferson's job, which he would keep for 40 years until he made a featful mistake, was to read one of the oldest, strangest, most beloved weather forecasts in the world. It's been going for, you know, a hundred years now and it's become a really part of the

culture here and it's a much loved institution. People regard it as poetry. This is Charlie Connolly. My name's Charlie Connolly. I'm a writer and occasional radio presenter and I've written a number of travel books including attentional shipping, a journey around the shipping forecast. Charlie is pretty into the shipping forecast. 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 20 plus five in time for that early morning shipping forecast. OK, Charlie is really into the shipping forecast. I'm quite obsessed. The story of how Charlie's favorite radio program came to be begins in the 1850s with a man named Fitzroy. It goes back to Admiral Robert Fitzroy who was the captain of the Beagle Charles Darwin ship. After a long, tumultuous, sometimes controversial career that took him all over the world, Bob Fitzroy decided he wanted to find a solution to one of the most serious problems facing sailors in the 19th century.

The weather. By the mid-19th century, the amount of shipping around the world was absolutely phenomenal. There were ships crossing the oceans all the time and huge storms were blow up at sea and ships would be lost, lives would be lost, cargo would be lost. Around this time people were just beginning to understand the connection between air pressure and storms and Fitzroy got really interested in this because of the potential applications for maritime work. Fitzroy was appointed head of the new meteorological office, and he poured all his energy into the study of air pressure. He had a barometer, and he would use it to try to figure out what the weather was about to do. And then one day, in 1859, a ship called the Royal Charter was sailing from Australia to Liverpool.

Many of the passengers on board were miners returning from the Australian Goldfields. They were almost home when suddenly. A huge storm blew up in the RSC and chased the ship up the coast. Robert Fitzroy was sitting in his house in London at the time. And he saw his barometer on the wall at home. He saw it suddenly drop dramatically. So he knew there was a big storm somewhere

in the vicinity of Britain and Ireland. The captain of the royal charter tried to write out the storm, but eventually the winds blew the ship onto the rocks. The royal charter sunk and over 450 people drowned. Where old Fitzroy took this really badly because he kind of felt responsible almost for this terrible disaster that he couldn't warn anyone. Fitzroy decided to devote the rest of his life to saving lives at sea by predicting the

weather. Which, in Victorian times, was pretty controversial because they were very religious people and anything that kind of sounded a bit like prophecy, was kind of hereby dragons and witchcraft as far as the Victorians were concerned. So he decided to use a synonym for prophecy that didn't sound quite so witchy. He invented, as I say, invented the term weather forecast

to distinguish it from prophecy and superstition and all that kind of thing. Fitzroy, inventor of the weather forecast, delivered his prognostications by telegraph to the various ports around the UK. Signal flags were hoisted in the harbor to warn ships heading out to sea. Eventually his forecasts were published in the newspaper, and while they were often ridiculed by readers at the time, they were pretty accurate, and they became indispensable for sailors in Fischerman.

I mean, it's impossible to calculate the number of lives that were saved as a result of Fitzroy and his work. And decades after his death, Fitzroy's shipping forecast would expand its reach and become a British-spoken word love poem to the sea. All thanks to a new technology. Radio. The BBC. This is Toyota, the first shipping forecast went out on

the airwaves. The BBC radio full. Now, the shipping forecast is she by the metaphors. There have been many shipping forecast readers over the years. Viking, North Achara, South Achara. Easterly or Southeastly becoming cyclonic five to seven squally shars, moderate or good. In 1969, Peter Jefferson joined the club. When he first started, he didn't understand the words

he was reading. He was not a sailor. In fact, he couldn't even swim. He didn't know the difference between a gale and a cyclone. He didn't know exactly where doggar was. So somebody took me to one side and said, well, it doesn't sound as though you're quite across this, so this is what it means. Peter learned that the numbers are wind speeds.

The directions are wind directions, and the random adjectives like good or poor are descriptions of the visibility. And all those whimsical names are real places, regions of the ocean around Great Britain named by the Met Office. Some are named after islands or towns along the coast. Some are named after rivers. Some are named after sand banks.

There's one called Rockall, which literally is a rock sticking out of the sea, inhabited by sea girls, nothing else, I think. Sailors know how to decode the shipping forecast, and over the years it has provided them with really important information. But most people in Great Britain are landlubbers. They do not need to know the weather conditions around some sea-girl rock hundreds of miles from the nearest coastline.

Still, there's just something about the forecast that appeals to them. Many people find the words and the, I suppose, the tone and the pace, quite mesmerizing in a way. People have described it as everything from just very soothing to a sort of prayer. And maybe you can see where this is heading. Maybe as you listen to Peter, your eyelids are getting heavy, and your thoughts are getting dreamy. If this is the case, you are not alone. Peter discovered pretty early on that people all across Great Britain were tuning into the

late night shipping forecast just before 1 o'clock in the morning, for something entirely different from its intended purpose. Somebody once said to me, we love listening to you sending me a sleep at late at night. Peter was lulling them into sweet, sweet oblivion. I took this little backhanded compliment really in a way. For the record, I hear this a lot too. You have told me that my voice puts you to sleep. It doesn't bother me. I'm sure you wake up in the morning and listen to every episode from the beginning and

really appreciate the craftsmanship and the quality journalism. You know, if one sort of cuts oneself off from the actual meaning, it doesn't actually have that time have a meaning to you. Then it's just a, I hope, pleasant voice, speaking to you in a soothing way. On YouTube, someone shrung dozens of shipping forecasts together into a five hour video. And in the comments, there are all these people going on and on about how much the shipping

forecast has helped cure their insomnia. I fall asleep to this almost every night. There's something oddly soothing about it. Yep, boars the pants off me to sleep as well. Y'all. There's dozens of these comments. Love this. So boring.

Bedtime story. ZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ But these days, many sailors have weather radar on board and smartphones with internet access. I'm surprised actually that it's still there because there are many other ways of now getting that information rather than listening to the radio. And yet decade after decade, the BBC continues to broadcast the forecast every single day at the exact same time. Some years ago now they changed the time the shipping forecast went out and there were literally thousands of people marching on broadcasting house in London. This might be a bit of an exaggeration but the point is the British love the shipping forecast and you shouldn't try to take it away from them. So goodness knows what might happen that it will be a civil be civil war-resting.

Over his decades-long career, Peter Jefferson became one of the most recognizable readers of the shipping forecast, and his voice was a metronome for sailors and insomniacs alike. Peter had all kinds of other responsibilities at the BBC, but he could never really escape his association with the forecast, not even at his own wedding. And my then future wife and myself were outside the church and we had these great gaffors of laughter going on inside before we went in and we thought, what Earth is going on? The vicar was in there delivering what he called their wedding forecast in which he described their partnership as moderate, becoming good. Which caused a great deal of laughter,

and when we heard it, we thought it was fantastic. And then one day, after learning some bad news, Peter made a mistake. Earlier that day I'd been told I'd got prostate cancer and quite honestly I didn't think I should have gone into work that day because my mind was not on what I was actually doing. It was on other things as you can probably imagine. He stumbled over his words during the transition.

I thought I closed the mic, but I hadn't, and I said, oh fuck. And unfortunately it went out. And I followed it shortly afterwards. Peter was fired. I got a phone call at home from my boss saying that they would honor that the shifts I'd got over the next few weeks, but after that, thank you and goodbye. The BBC has consistently maintained that they didn't fire Peter because of this slip-up. He had been around for a long time and they wanted to get some fresh faces in the building. Funnily enough, I mean, I was thinking of stopping on a few months later anyway.

The forecast must go on though, and it does. The shipping forecast going out four times a day, I think, is terrifically important in terms of warning people of bad weather and just reminding people that we're a maritime people, we're a maritime nation. This is Charlie Connelly again. He talks about the shipping forecast like it's a piece of literature

and owed to Great Britain's relationship with the sea. We've got national epics like the Canterbury Tales and Bear Wolf and I would argue for the shipping forecast to be the modern equivalent of a British national epic. A national epic with new chapters written every day, four times a day, by a bunch of meteorologists in an office block somewhere. By these guys sitting at desks, you know, with waste paper bins next to them, with browning apple cores in them, and you know, and their wives texting them saying, what's so many be home, and they're producing this amazing stuff. It's it. I hear those, every one of them. As for our hero, Peter Jefferson, getting fired did not sever his connection with the shipping forecast.

If anything, it made it stronger. It gave him time to write an entire book about it, and he's got a new project. Well, that was just last year, right? I got an email out of the blue. The email was from the Popular Meditation app, Com. Com produces what they call sleep stories, meant to be listened to right before bed, and they wanted Peter to read the shipping forecast for them. They just thought it would make a rather soothing bedtime story. Peter obliged. He read the forecast from his last day at the BBC.

It was a pretty quiet day, otherwise. No major storms. They asked me to read it much more slowly than I would normally did on on air, but apparently here it worked and it's been very successful. So successful that they hired him to read another of their bedtime stories. And this one has nothing to do with the shipping forecast. What they want me to do is read this very, very long and very, very turgid legaleseese documents which they think will put some people to sleep and I think they're absolutely right. Here's a little

taste of Peter reading from the EU's recent general data protection regulation. Having regards to the treaty of the functioning of the European Union and in particular article 16 thereof, it's pretty sino-winding stuff. Having regard to the proposal from the European Commission, having regard to the opinion of the European Economic and Social Committee. He may not be saving lives at sea, but Peter believes helping people get to sleep is a very honorable profession. As somebody who has huge problems falling asleep himself,

I hope that it does work, because I know a horrible thing it is if you can't get to sleep. German bite Hummer. West backing, Southwest, 40 5, increasing 6 at first, occasional rain, moderate or good, Thames, Derva, White. Variable, becoming Southwestally 3 or 4, increasing 4 or 5 later, mainly fair, moderate or good. Is that enough for you? That's great.

I was just always going to stop you, but then I got mesmerized and I want to finish. Peter Jefferson's book is called, and now the Shipping Forecast. And Charlie Conley's book is called Attention All Shipping, a journey around the shipping forecast. You can find links to both on our website. It's 9i9pi.org. You're still awake. If you are still awake, dear listener, stay tuned for more of the art of putting people to sleep with sound. After the break. Okay, so the shipping forecast became a bedtime ritual for a lot of people accidentally, and the same can be said of our show.

Although this week's episode might be a bit of an exception, most of the time we're not trying to put you to sleep, but I'm here with Drew Ackerman, who is the creator of a podcast called Sleep With Me, and the whole goal of his show is to help people dose off. Yeah, so Sleep With Me is a bedtime story podcast for grownups, and the whole idea is to take the listeners

mind off of what's keeping them awake, to just engage them enough so they can pay attention to the story or to what I'm saying, but where they don't feel the pressure to keep listening, and there's also the risk of like this compelling thing coming up. I might show, I steer right around the compelling parts and I go into the inane details, this is my kind of specialty, but it's just like a bedside companion that's meant to be there. In the migrip on the listener, ideally, it's just loose enough that they feel like they could just let go of my hand and drift away when they want to.

Yeah. I think that if you were to look up what relaxation videos on YouTube, there's a harp music or a whooshing sounds or people whispering or something. This appeals to this sort of the intellectual monkey mind that is tripping away at your day. And you create something enough of a narrative that people can latch onto,

but it's loose enough that people can also drift away from. And how did you come up with this as the way to be that type of bedtime companion? Yeah, well, I have this controversy, I'll believe that I don't want to bring up on the podcast, but I call that kind of part of our brain, brain bots. And I believe that my brain and maybe other people's brains are populated by these little droids. In all of these droids, they have served these different purposes, like worrying thinking about the past.

And none of them have sleep modes, unfortunately. And I found that by just kind of saying, hey, come on over here. Let me tell you a story. I hear you're worrying about high school. And when you spill that lemonade down, you a story. Here's what you're worrying about high school. And when you spill that lemonade down your shirt, I'm going to talk about suspenders for a little while and rainbow suspenders in particular. And the idea is that even one party is going to be like, wait a second, I could pitch your rainbow suspenders. I've had, I've never had them, but ideally it's like something that's just visual enough and just interesting enough that you'll think about it for a few minutes and interrupt your train of thoughts.

But then you'll be like, okay, it's been 14 minutes. He's still talking about rainbow suspenders. And like, he is trying to, I can see him trying to make a metaphor about it. You know, what's somewhere under the rainbow suspender or so they get it. What we do, here's a question that just came up was recording this interview. Are there any leprechauns that have rainbow suspenders? Because they should. But I really want to delight people or make them feel some kind of delight versus bedtime that can feel so serious and ominous. And even if I don't hit that goal, it's like, I joke with listeners like, I might not make you smile,

but maybe I could bring your face to a neutral level. And that's it. I hit my gut. It's like by over trying to overshoot, I can just get to the place where the people, instead of laughing or gofying, they say, oh yeah, yeah, that's pretty good. Drew's approach to storytelling is quite unique, but over the years, he has tried to fall asleep

to lots of different types of audio. When he was growing up, there was this comedy radio show called Dr. Demento, and he liked to listen to it late at night to help him get to sleep. So when I was a kid and I had trouble sleeping, I remember I was telling this one classmate, like I can't sleep at night, and Sunday nights are the worst because they start having anxiety about school,

and I've been at school a few days. And he said, my older brother listens to this radio show, and it's on Sunday nights from 9 to 11, and it's a comedy radio show. They play parody songs, and I tuned into it, and I guess one of the things I wanted in the doctor, Demento provided. And like this can be like a overused word or sound over ambitious, but like it really is this idea of compassion when you break up the word like suffering with or suffering together. And I'll take Dr. Demento knew that, but it was like Dr. Demento was there with me

sitting by my bedside saying, Hey, this kind of stinks. You can't sleep and I really feel bad for you. And when I can't sleep, I have this story about myself running through my brain, about the past, about the future. And I want to just misdirect people and say, Hey, listen to this story over here. It's a it's a nicer story. You're not a character in it. And it's just here to keep you company. And here's the thing, you don't even need to listen to it. You don't even need to fall asleep. I'll just be here to tell you the story.

And yeah, I guess that's what I wanted as a kid too. Now that you've been doing sleep with me for a few years, what kind of feedback have you gotten from the listeners of the show? So within the first eight months of the show, occasionally at the end, I would make jokes. And I think it was because I was new to podcasting and I was really afraid, I would make self-effacing jokes,

like, oh, no one's probably listening to this at this point in the show. And I remember I got three emails in a row from people saying, please don't say that. Like, I am awake at the end of the show, and I'm listening to the show to be distracted, like, because I'm not gonna fall asleep, and it's painful for me to be reminded of that.

And it brought me right back to that memory of, like, lying there when I listened to Dr. Mento, there was no hope of me falling asleep either. So that was one piece of feedback that was pretty powerful. And then it's like just getting feedback about what people are afraid of and then trying to steer around that. Like for spiders, it'd be like web-based beings or for any other animals that are scary. It's like forced friends.

Like stuff like that. Like try to just drive the car right around those trees, so you know, crash into them. That's so funny. That's Drew Ackerman, host and creator of the podcast, Sleep With Me. Check out Sleep With Me, wherever you listen to podcasts. 99% Invisible was produced this week by Emmett Fitzgerald, Mix and Tech Production by Sharif Yusuf, Music by Sean Rial. Katie Mingle is our senior producer, Kurt Colstead is the digital director.

The rest of the team includes senior editor-genilani Hall Avery Troubleman, Joe Rosenberg, Vivian Lee, Taren Mazza, and me Roman Mars. We are a project of 91.7 K-A-L-W in San Francisco and produced on Radio Row in beautiful, downtown, Oakland, California. 99% of visible is a member of Radio Topia from PRX, an independent collective of the most innovative shows in all of podcasting. Find them all at radiotopia.fm. You can find the show and join discussions about the show on Facebook.

You can tweet at me at Roman Mars and the show at 99PI Ork. We're on Instagram, Tumblr, and Reddit too. But if you want a bunch of other 99PI episodes for you to play as you are drifting off to sleep, go to 99PI.org. And now the shipping forecast issued by the Met Office on behalf of 99% invisible for Monday, 23 July 2018.

The area forecast for the next 24 hours. West Viking, southerly 4 or 5, becoming variable 3 later, slight, mainly fair, moderate or good. East Viking, North Atsira, West South Atsira, variable 3 or 4, slight, fair, good. East South at 0, northwestern leaf 5 or 6, backing western leaf 4 later, moderate, becoming slight later, fair, good. 40s, South-Virgin Southwest, 3 or 4arty, Fourth, Time Variable, mainly South or Southwest, 3 or 4, increasing 5 at times, slight, fair, then rain, good, occasionally poor later. Dogger, South or Southwest, 3 or 4, slight, fair, good.

Northeast Fisher North-East Fisher North-Western Lee 5 or 6, backing Westerly 4 later, moderate becoming slight later, fair, good. Temescal Piedmont North-West 3 or 4, increasing 5 at times, slight showers later, good occasionally moderate. Bushrod Rock Ridge, North-Ely or Northwest-Ely 4 or 5, occasionally 6, slight or moderate showers, Thundery at first, good. Grand Lake, North or Northwest 4 four or five, occasionally six-later, slight or moderate, fair, good. Highland Park, Glenview, Western or Northwestern, three or four, occasionally five, except in Glenview, slight or moderate, fair, then rain or showers, good occasionally moderate. Elmerced, variable three or four becoming southwest four or five, slight, fair than rain,

good occasionally poor. Alameda Fruitvale Jingle-Town Southwest Viering Northwest four or five, occasionally six at first except in Fruitvale. Slight or moderate, rain or drizzle, good occasionally poor. West Oakland, west or northwest four or five, moderate occasionally slight later in west, rain then fair, good. Lower bottoms. Sutherly four or five occasionally six at first in west, becoming variable three or four,

slight or moderate, occasional rain, fog patches, moderate or good, occasionally very poor. Jack London Square Sutherly varying north-westernly four or five, occasionally six at first in east, then decreasing three for a time. Moderate becoming slight or moderate, rain or drizzle, fog patches, moderate or good, occasionally very poor. Chinatown Cyclonic mainly-northily five or six, becoming variable three or four, slight or moderate, fog patches at first, moderate or good, occasionally very poor at first. Beautiful, downtown, Oakland, California, variable one or two, fog early, then fair, good, becoming Heligud.

Radio Tapio.