Connelly, Anecdotes 2 to 3 , Fair to Good
Posted on 11th September 2026
When I first heard Charlie Connelly was doing a show based around the Shipping Forecast on Radio Four, I wondered whatever was there to say and who would be interested. I should have known better. Connelly faced a packed house at the Corn Hall, eager to find out. Attention All Shipping was billed as a celebration of an institution he considers one of the greatest inventions known to man. A curious hybrid of TED talk and gentle comedy – imagine Alan Titchmarsh sharing his passion for topiary – this was a thoroughly engaging evening that zipped along its two-hour running time.
After a brief run-through of the dubious seafaring history of the Connelly family, the greater part of the first half of the evening was devoted to the extraordinary life and work of Robert FitzRoy, who effectively invented weather forecasting. FitzRoy is probably best known as the captain of the Beagle, the ship that took Darwin to South America, but his real legacy was the revolutionary idea that predicting the weather could save lives at sea. Were it not for his untimely death by suicide, explained Connelly, he would have had a far greater prominence in our history books. It’s only in the last few years that his contribution has been recognised, culminating in the renaming of Finisterre to FitzRoy. This neatly took us back to the subject in hand, a broadcast by the BBC that has remained substantially the same for over a hundred years.
After the break, we were introduced to the cultural influence of the forecast, with anyone from Radiohead to Seamus Heaney throwing their hat in the ring. It is, after all, the strange lyrical quality of the forecast that is so attractive. Described by Carol Ann Duffy as a radio prayer and by Charlotte Green as poetry, the forecast means so much more to folk than a forecast. We heard some hilarious anecdotes based around his mission to visit each one of the areas. Not all these trips ended in triumph — the coast of Denmark can lay claim to the most boring town on earth — but the history of the independent state of Sealand was hilarious. So too were the increasingly bizarre efforts of the UK to claim Rockall as British territory.
While Connelly’s boyish enthusiasm for the subject was infectious, he was keen to emphasise the forecast was not a quaint curiosity. In a rare sober moment, he closed on a reminder how many lives it has saved.