If culture is, as Wendy James has argued, ‘adverbial’ rather than ‘nominal’, what kind of cultural geography of the Isles is practised in the poems which draw upon the forecast’s daily and nightly ritual of naming the sea areas around Britain and Ireland? How might this maritime and archipelagic imagination of the Isles be related to current post-devolutionary attempts to reconceive the British Isles, both politically and intellectually? All of the poems revel in the forecast’s litany of names such as Dogger, Fastnet, Lundy, Heligoland and Finisterre, for example, which do not evoke places so much as they imply ideas of untapped spatial and cultural possibility within the British Isles. The aim of the lecture is to consider how both the radio broadcast and the poems it inspired conceptualise the cultural geography of the British Isles. This lecture examines poems which make reference to the Shipping Forecast, as broadcast by BBC Radio Four, including poems by Seamus Heaney, Carol Ann Duffy, Sean Street, Andrew McNeillie, and Andrew Waterman. Series 13: Dublin, One City One Book 2015 - The Barrytown Trilogy.Series 11: Irish Studies and the Environmental Humanities.Series 10: The Ireland Chair of Poetry Lectures.Series 9: Dublin: One City, One Book Lectures 2014.Series 8: The Irish Memory Studies Research Network Lectures: 'Gender and Commemoration'.Series 7: The Literatures and Cultures of the Irish Sea.Series 6: The UCD / Notre Dame Lectures.Armchair travel will never be the same again. In ATTENTION ALL SHIPPING Charlie Connelly wittily explores the places behind the voice, those mysterious regions whose names seem often to bear no relation to conventional geography. Yet familiar though the sea areas are by name, few people give much thought to where they are or what they contain. There's no danger of a westerly gale eight, veering southwesterly increasing nine later (visibility poor) gusting through your average suburban living room, blowing the Sunday papers all over the place and startling the cat. Sitting at home listening to the shipping forecast can be a cosily reassuring experience.
Since its first broadcast in the 1920s it has inspired poems, songs and novels in addition to its intended objective of warning generations of seafarers of impending storms and gales. This solemn, rhythmic intonation of the shipping forecast on BBC radio is as familiar as the sound of Big Ben chiming the hour. Irish Sea' - the hilarious bestselling travel book that journeys round areas made famous by Radio 4's The Shipping Forecast.
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