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The Shipping Forecast is a very significant cultural reference in the UK. It crops up all over the place. Britain is _fundamentally_ an island and a seafaring n

The Shipping Forecast is a very significant cultural reference in the UK. It crops up all over the place. Britain is _fundamentally_ an island and a seafaring nation, and that's something Americans miss; you're never more than seventy miles from the sea. It's as iconic as, I don't know, Thanksgiving football in the US; it's a thing everyone knows about without explanation. This is from an album which sold over 1.2m copies in the UK; one of the biggest records of the 90s: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SD8gO8TAr4s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SD8gO8TAr4s

JdeBP 8y ago
See also https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16013325 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16013325 .
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
PaulRobinson 8y ago
And the music that runs up against it at night, Sailing Away, equally important reference. The nights I lay there, imagining the storms out there, particularly when depressed and alone, listening to the post-midnight "ceremonies" including the national anthem and lulled off to sleep before the World Service crept onto the airwaves... so many nights. It really is a part of me in some ways. It's interesting to me just how important BBC Radio 4 (formerly the Home Service), on which it is broadcast, is and has been to our collective culture. It's now seen in a more middle-class "sniffy" light - Radio 4 listeners are a certain "type", but think what it's given us: - It's where The Goons became famous: Peter Sellers, Spike Milligan and Harry Seacombe defined a certain age of comedy and inspired Monty Python and others. - Mornington Crescent is ironically one of the most iconic stations on the London Underground thanks to the game from the R4 show - All of Churchill's war-time speeches were broadcast there first - In the event of the death of the Queen, it will be announced first on the 8am Radio 4 news broadcast the following day (I'm not sure that can work in the modern era, but there we are) - Royal Navy Nuclear (weapon) submarines are to open a safe with hand-written letters of instruction from the Prime Minister if they can't pick up Radio 4 long-wave That's just off the top of my head.
- zeristor 8y ago
  And Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. V. Important
- Theodores 8y ago
  Sailing By, not 'away'... It is there to pad out the schedule and help people to find Radio 4 on a crowded night-time dial. Same with the National Anthem that follows. Even the 'pips' are there for this type of calibration, a tuning in to a British person's 'Britishness'. The way that the BBC is deeply woven into the British establishment and armed forces is obvious yet not so obvious. The BBC is a spin-off of British Forces Broadcasting Service, as per 'Better Call Saul'/'Breaking Bad' some content overlaps but the 'producers' are one and the same. You should never believe that the BBC is independently funded and free from some capitalist proprietor controlling what you think, it really is an organ of the British military industrial complex. Anyone 'socialist' gets weeded out by the very real 'Room 101'. Radio 4 is the true voice of establishment, and this differs slightly from the clowns of the day that happen to be in parliament. If you listen carefully then you can glean facts on BBC Radio 4 that are not presented on the TV news or written to paper, an off-hand comment here or there on an odd-hour Radio 4 program sneaks through when the rest of the world are self-censoring themselves during a crisis. When BBC Radio 4 rolls over and defaults to Number 10 propaganda without being honest, e.g. asserting that Russians are poisoning people in the UK without any 'alleged' or 'suspected' style words to distance fiction from fact, then that is when the folks in the submarine should go for the envelope...
  - dalore 8y ago
    That's funny, my conservative friends say that the BBC is biased and full of lefties against the government.
    - fanf2 8y ago
      https://www.bbc.com/news/stories-43754737 https://www.bbc.com/news/stories-43754737
  - isostatic 8y ago
js2 8y ago
I grew up in Miami. I can't imagine living more than a few hours drive from the ocean. So I sort of understand. FWIW, Hawaiians, Puerto Ricans, and other island-living Americans probably get it too. :-)
- ksdale 8y ago
  I grew up very near the Puget Sound in Washington state, and I feel the same way! I just did a bit of research and discovered that in 2010, 39% of Americans lived in a coastal county. Given that many counties are rather small, especially on the East Coast, I wouldn't be surprised if as many as 50 or 60% of Americans lived within 70 miles of the coast.
dmd 8y ago
> Britain is _fundamentally_ an island and a seafaring nation, and that's something Americans miss; you're never more than seventy miles from the sea. In 2010, 123 million Americans, or 39 percent of the nation’s population lived in counties directly on the ocean. There's only 53 million people living in Britain total.

JdeBP 8y ago

See also https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16013325 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16013325 .

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

PaulRobinson 8y ago

And the music that runs up against it at night, Sailing Away, equally important reference. The nights I lay there, imagining the storms out there, particularly when depressed and alone, listening to the post-midnight "ceremonies" including the national anthem and lulled off to sleep before the World Service crept onto the airwaves... so many nights. It really is a part of me in some ways. It's interesting to me just how important BBC Radio 4 (formerly the Home Service), on which it is broadcast, is and has been to our collective culture. It's now seen in a more middle-class "sniffy" light - Radio 4 listeners are a certain "type", but think what it's given us: - It's where The Goons became famous: Peter Sellers, Spike Milligan and Harry Seacombe defined a certain age of comedy and inspired Monty Python and others. - Mornington Crescent is ironically one of the most iconic stations on the London Underground thanks to the game from the R4 show - All of Churchill's war-time speeches were broadcast there first - In the event of the death of the Queen, it will be announced first on the 8am Radio 4 news broadcast the following day (I'm not sure that can work in the modern era, but there we are) - Royal Navy Nuclear (weapon) submarines are to open a safe with hand-written letters of instruction from the Prime Minister if they can't pick up Radio 4 long-wave That's just off the top of my head.

zeristor 8y ago
And Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. V. Important
Theodores 8y ago
Sailing By, not 'away'... It is there to pad out the schedule and help people to find Radio 4 on a crowded night-time dial. Same with the National Anthem that follows. Even the 'pips' are there for this type of calibration, a tuning in to a British person's 'Britishness'. The way that the BBC is deeply woven into the British establishment and armed forces is obvious yet not so obvious. The BBC is a spin-off of British Forces Broadcasting Service, as per 'Better Call Saul'/'Breaking Bad' some content overlaps but the 'producers' are one and the same. You should never believe that the BBC is independently funded and free from some capitalist proprietor controlling what you think, it really is an organ of the British military industrial complex. Anyone 'socialist' gets weeded out by the very real 'Room 101'. Radio 4 is the true voice of establishment, and this differs slightly from the clowns of the day that happen to be in parliament. If you listen carefully then you can glean facts on BBC Radio 4 that are not presented on the TV news or written to paper, an off-hand comment here or there on an odd-hour Radio 4 program sneaks through when the rest of the world are self-censoring themselves during a crisis. When BBC Radio 4 rolls over and defaults to Number 10 propaganda without being honest, e.g. asserting that Russians are poisoning people in the UK without any 'alleged' or 'suspected' style words to distance fiction from fact, then that is when the folks in the submarine should go for the envelope...
- dalore 8y ago
  That's funny, my conservative friends say that the BBC is biased and full of lefties against the government.
  - fanf2 8y ago
    https://www.bbc.com/news/stories-43754737 https://www.bbc.com/news/stories-43754737
- isostatic 8y ago

js2 8y ago

I grew up in Miami. I can't imagine living more than a few hours drive from the ocean. So I sort of understand. FWIW, Hawaiians, Puerto Ricans, and other island-living Americans probably get it too. :-)

ksdale 8y ago
I grew up very near the Puget Sound in Washington state, and I feel the same way! I just did a bit of research and discovered that in 2010, 39% of Americans lived in a coastal county. Given that many counties are rather small, especially on the East Coast, I wouldn't be surprised if as many as 50 or 60% of Americans lived within 70 miles of the coast.

dmd 8y ago

> Britain is _fundamentally_ an island and a seafaring nation, and that's something Americans miss; you're never more than seventy miles from the sea. In 2010, 123 million Americans, or 39 percent of the nation’s population lived in counties directly on the ocean. There's only 53 million people living in Britain total.