Yahoo News Voice of the Shipping Forecast returns to lull listeners to sleep - but not on the BBC
When Peter Jefferson was axed by the BBC after 40 years as the voice of the Shipping Forecast, listeners were bereft.
Now they can hear his soothing delivery once more. Mr Jefferson has come out of retirement to record a new version of the forecast designed as “a bedtime story for grown-ups”.
The 26-minute recording appears on an app providing auditory sleep aids for those who struggle to nod off. Mr Jefferson explains the history of the forecast and its significance in broadcasting history before launching into the familiar rundown of weather areas, all to a background soundtrack of tinkling water and birdsong.
The BBC ended Mr Jefferson’s contract in 2009, to the dismay of his faithful audience. A month earlier, during a daytime announcement, he had turned the air blue by fluffing one of his lines and muttering: “F---!” during the pips.
The corporation insisted that his departure was not related to his faux pas but that they had “decided to make some space on our freelance rota to provide more opportunities to newcomers”.
However, Mr Jefferson, 71, said yesterday: “It was a strange coincidence, let’s say. But you could hypothesise until the cows come home.”
The cause of his on-air slip-up was that he had just received some bad news. “The reason for it happening on that particular day was very unfortunate.
“I had, earlier that day, been told that I had prostate cancer. I really wasn’t in any frame of mind to be on air.”
He is now in “fine” health and bears no ill will towards the BBC. “I think their minds had been made up, and it all turned out well in the end,” he said.
The app, Calm.com, offers a series of recordings designed to help people sleep. This particular Shipping Forecast features calm weather and no gale warnings.
Mr Jefferson said: “There is a mix of appeal but it strikes me that perhaps more people listen to the forecast as a soothing thing, less as a source of information. Some people used to give me the slightly backhanded compliment:‘You send me to sleep.’ I hope I have not lost the knack.”
He joined the BBC in 1964 as a librarian, before working as an announcer on the World Service, the Home Service, the Light Programme and Radio 4. He began reading the Shipping Forecast in 1969.
On the recording, he says the Radio 4 broadcast lists “places that most listeners have never visited and cannot point out on a map but, thanks to the Shipping Forecast, have become part of their lives.”
