16 mm film, 12.01 hrs GMT, Wednesday 9 December 1998

Due to copyright restrictions, we cannot publish an excerpt from the film. However, you can see it on display on the big screen at the main Museum entrance.

A scene from Shipping Forecast by Lucy Blakstad, 1998 ©Lucy BlakstadLucy Blakstad directed a short film about the sea that takes as its theme the BBC Radio 4 Shipping Forecast. The film is a personal response to this traditional broadcast and succeeds in making distant places, whose names are so familiar, real to the visitor. The shipping forecast covers an area of sea and coastline that stretches from Iceland, across to Scandinavia, around the British Isles, Spain and Portugal. In Blakstad's film each shot highlights the diversity of these places, depicting a variety of people, landscapes and seascapes in locations such as Shannon, south east Iceland, Rockall and Fair Isle.

The title refers to the soundtrack of the film – the actual forecast broadcast on that day. The real time pictures accompanying the forecast were shot on location as its weather forecast was broadcast. Each shot was selected by Blakstad on an earlier research trip and then filmed by 15 different cameramen on location.

There is a definite awareness, if you have been brought up in the UK, of living on an island. The feeling of being surrounded by sea is deep within our consciousness. What does the sea mean to me? Family holidays twice a year on the north coast of Wales and more recently Brighton beach. Listening to the Shipping Forecast on Radio 4, evoking pictures in my mind of lashing seas and faraway, almost mystical-sounding places.
Lucy Blakstad, 1998