A Tour De Force – Charlie Connelly’s attention All Shipping reaches Scarborough

He ambles onto the stage looking rather like a middle-aged 1950s’ bank clerk who has wandered off on holiday in search of a deckchair. Instead, he finds a comfortable chair, an old Bush radio set - and an audience. What follows is almost two hours of storytelling, and in the hands of Charlie Connelly it becomes a veritable tour de force.

Attention All Shipping is based on Connelly’s bestselling travel book of the same name, first published in 2004 and reissued in 2024 with new material to mark the centenary of the Shipping Forecast. The book sent Connelly on an extraordinary journey around the sea areas immortalised by the BBC broadcast. The stage show brings its history, characters and adventures vividly to life.

At the SJT’s McCarthy last night, Connelly spends fifty minutes either side of the interval holding the stage almost entirely through the sheer force of his storytelling. There is no elaborate theatrical machinery, and no need for it. He simply talks - fluently, intelligently and with an infectious enthusiasm for his subject - proving himself to be a born raconteur.

The Shipping Forecast itself is the starting point: those familiar, evocative names that drift across the radio waves and have become part of the national consciousness, often serving as a soothing bedtime lullaby rather than being heard as the vital maritime bulletin they actually are. Connelly explores how this peculiar broadcast came into being, beginning with the extraordinary story of Vice-Admiral Robert FitzRoy, the tragic genius and captain of HMS Beagle, whose pioneering work helped lay the foundations of modern weather forecasting. There’s also the small matter of his having taken Charles Darwin on a voyage of discovery.

It is undoubtedly Connelly’s gift for finding the absurd and the unexpected that makes the evening so entertaining. The story of Sealand, the tiny self-declared principality in the North Sea, provides an extended and hilarious anecdote, as does Rockall, the remote Atlantic outcrop over which Britain once asserted its claim. Connelly explores the curious lengths to which nations have gone to plant their flags on seemingly inhospitable pieces of rock, turning what could easily become dry exercises in geography or constitutional history into wonderfully entertaining tales of eccentricity, ambition and British stubbornness.

The focus becomes more personal as Connelly recounts his own gloriously eccentric undertaking to visit all thirty-one sea areas named in the broadcast. From Dogger and Fisher to Rockall and Fastnet, our modern-day seafarer traverses the coast, replacing Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner’s supernatural voyage with something altogether more prosaic - and considerably funnier. His encounters with distant, windswept places and the bemusement of locals wondering why on earth an Englishman has travelled such distances simply to stand somewhere most of us would struggle to locate on a map provide some of the evening’s richest stories.

He dissects the unique linguistic poetry of the forecast with genuine reverence, inviting the audience to savour phrases like smooth becoming slight later or veering southwesterly, while playfully contrasting the harsh reality of life at sea with the millions of sleepy travellers listening safely beneath their duvets.

The Shipping Forecast might not initially seem like natural material for a compelling evening of theatre, yet Connelly possesses the rare ability to reveal the human dimension concealed within something familiar. His enthusiasm is never forced; instead, it becomes infectious, until you find yourself genuinely fascinated by a subject you may never previously have considered particularly interesting.

To hold an audience for two fifty-minute sessions with little more than words, stories and strength of personality is a remarkable feat. In an age when theatre can sometimes feel compelled to throw digital spectacle and elaborate production values at an audience, Connelly demonstrates just how powerful a single storyteller can be. His command of language, timing and narrative keeps the audience effortlessly engaged.

After hundreds of performances, every pause, raised eyebrow, change of pace and perfectly-timed aside is unaffectedly instinctive. The storytelling may appear casual, but it is clearly the product of a performer who knows his material inside out and has honed and perfected his art.

By the end of the evening, those mysterious names have acquired a history, a geography, a human dimension - and a certain Connelly magic. A quite remarkable evening and a genuine tour de force.