We'll miss the shipping forecast

The long-wave shipping forecast reaches its centenary in 2024, though it’s not much of a celebration given that LW itself, ‘at the end of its life as a technology’, will be turned off sometime in the middle of the year.

- LIBBY PURVES

The forecasts will continue, though only twice a day on weekdays on Radio 4 FM, DAB, BBC Sounds etc, growing to three times a day at weekends. The long-wave bits of the mighty Droitwich transmitter will be closed down for the last time.

So the last of the metre-high water-cooled glass valves are beaming their final few months of 198kHz messages. A few years ago we were told there were only 10 of these valves in the world, and the BBC had to buy up the lot. Apparently trying to make new ones might cause the other Droitwich transmitters to fizz and blow. No longer will that intriguing glassware send out shipping forecasts and cricket commentary over land and sea. It’s quite a moment; in 1992 Radio 4 ‘Save Long Wave’ demonstrators, fed up with the slow growth of good FM and not having yet dreamed of DAB, barracked Broadcasting House in a polite Radio 4 way, and expats on the near Continent worried at the loss of Test Match Special, their British birthright.