Bring back the Radio 4 UK Theme

Pope Francis has declared 2025 a jubilee year for the Catholic Church. Not to be outdone, BBC Radio 4 has also proclaimed this year a jubilee to mark the centenary of the most venerable and spiritual part of its output: the Shipping Forecast. 

Soon after the Pope began the jubilee year by opening the holy doors of St Peter’s and passing through singing hymns, so too did Radio 4 start 2025 with paeans of praise to “The Ships”. New Year’s Day had several hours of programming on their history and significance, and their website now offers a tab with extra content and a Great Shipping Forecast Quiz: “Are You Moderate Becoming Good Later?”.

In a society where we have lost so many of the ritual markers of time which were once tied to religious observance — morning and evening prayer whether at home or in church, grace before meals, the idea of the monastic hours or the church calendar — it should be no surprise that many people now feel a sense of pious devotion to regular items on the radio schedule, rather like an orphaned ducking will attach itself to a cat, dog, or football in the absence of its mother. 

But even if such misplaced piety should seem strange, it should not be mocked. It is at least a sign that the capacity and regular need for a sense of the holy still widely exists. And indeed, the Shipping Forecast undeniably smacks of the numinous. It is probably the closest most people get to hearing the psalms or epic poetry on a daily basis. It might not quite be Milton’s vision

…From Eden over Pontus, and the Poole
Mæotis, up beyond the River Ob;
Downward as farr Antartic; and in length
West from Orontes to the Ocean barr’d
At Darien, thence to the Land where flowes
Ganges and Indus…

But the regular recital of “Viking, North Utsire, South Utsire…” still offers a few tatters of that resounding bardic grandeur. Its language, and its “cold and mysterious fierceness… played out in warm and familiar calmness” is like a music deep in the soul, commented an interviewee on one programme. Its rhythms and meditative qualities throw “your imagination round these islands”, commented another, evoking memory, excitement, and reverence. 

This reverence is even more pronounced for Sailing By. This is the lilting and other-worldly theme tune by Ronald Binge, which has been played daily since 1973 (save for a brief interval around 1993) at around 12.45 am to introduce the late-night Shipping Forecast. Radio 4 dedicated a whole programme to it. For one sailor, the music has become “synonymous with the elements around me… the rise and fall of the ship”, the sea swell, its movement, and the stars. It is “a promise of hope that a new day will break” said the writer Henrietta McKervey: something that matters “at a deep level I hadn’t fully understood,” and which brought a sense of comfort and safety. 

It is all very well for Radio 4 to laud itself for its care of its heritage and the fact that the Shipping Forecast now stands as a virtual national liturgy which provides a vital social service catering for the unfulfilled spiritual longings of millions. Yet, its extensive and fulsome coverage was marred by a dark and vital omission. Its stewardship of this broadcast patrimony, which it knows has taken such a mystical place in the imaginations of so many, has been far less diligent than they would like us to suppose. 

In 1978, not long after Sailing By was chosen to introduce the late-night Shipping Forecast, another piece of music was also commissioned to accompany the early morning Shipping Forecast and open the day’s transmissions. This piece, known as the Radio 4 UK Theme, also served to mark an important milestone in the development of broadcasting. The move of Radio 4 from Medium Wave to Long Wave allowed the station to make unified broadcasts to the whole of the UK. To celebrate this, the then controller of Radio 4, Ian McIntyre, asked for a piece of music which would bring together traditional and folk tunes from around the whole of the British Isles. 

The commission was entrusted to Fritz Spiegl. Spiegl was a wartime Jewish Austrian refugee to England. He arrived in 1939 at the age of 13 speaking no English, but fell in love with the country and its language. He was a self-taught musician who eventually became principal flautist with the Liverpool Philharmonic, a composer, and a classic English eccentric (also remembered for the Z-Cars theme). 

You can listen to the UK Theme here: a joyful and ingenious five-minute interweaving of old melodies that conjures up a portrait of the country both stirring, wistful and affectionate. One travels across the four nations of the Union through the mixture of Early One Morning, Greensleaves and Jeremiah Clarke’s Trumpet Voluntary for England; Scotland is represented by Annie Laurie and Scotland the Brave; Wales by Men of Harlech; and Ireland by A Londonderry Air. What Shall We Do With The Drunken Sailor and Rule Britannia also fly the flag for the Royal Navy and look towards the Shipping Forecast itself. 

For years, the UK Theme and Sailing By bookended Radio 4’s daily broadcasts, like the monastic offices of mattins and compline (of course, not forgetting the National Anthem at the very close of day). And the UK Theme attracted the same level and type of dedication as Sailing By and the Shipping Forecast. Listeners recognised it not only as a “bastion of calm in a traumatic world” in the words of one on an old BBC discussion board, but were moved by its wider significance. “It is about all [the] culture of the whole nation” said another, and one of the “symbols which remind us of our common heritage.” After many years in use, it had become not just part of “BBC Culture”, but also a wider “jigsaw that [is] the tradition and culture of our country.”

The Radio 4 UK Theme served as a moment of almost spiritual contemplation of national identity, unity, and cultural continuity

But this accumulated sanctity and cultural significance to so many was not enough to protect it. Perhaps this even made it a target. In 2006, the left-leaning controller of Radio 4, Mark Damazer, made a perfunctory decision (like Pope Francis swiftly trying to do away with the Latin Mass) that the UK Theme would be scrapped and replaced with a “pacy news briefing” which he claimed would better serve the listeners. The listeners disagreed. Thousands signed a petition against the move. Protest websites were set up and articles written in the national press. At PMQs, Tony Blair commented on the strength of national feeling about the change, and in the Commons a number of early day motions calling for the UK Theme to be kept attracted signatures from across the political spectrum, from Michael Gove, John Redwood and Nadine Dorries, to Jeremy Corbyn, John McDonnell, and Britain’s first Muslim MP Mohammad Sarwar. But this carried no weight with Damazer, who refused to change his mind. As if in mockery, the UK Theme was last broadcast on St George’s Day, 23 April 2006. 

The missing UK Theme is the Banquo’s Ghost of the celebrations about the Shipping Forecast and Sailing By. It is remarkable that a piece of music that is so intimately connected to the history of the Shipping Forecast and Radio 4 itself has been airbrushed out of the commemorations. It is not only symptomatic of a guilty conscience, but it also suggests a deeper reluctance on the part of the BBC to think about the fundamental role fulfilled by a national broadcaster. The Radio 4 UK Theme served as a moment of almost spiritual contemplation of national identity, unity, and cultural continuity before the frenzy of “pacy news” began. It gave a sense of rootedness, of the nature of home, and the transcendence of divisions with a long shared history and attachment to the land and coast. Why is it that Radio 4 does not want to remind us that this is what it once thought was worthy of offering us? And is this not something we need now from a national broadcaster more urgently than ever?