The Shipping Forecast is a very significant cultural reference in the UK. It crops up all over the place. Britain is _fundamentally_ an island and a seafaring nation, and that's something Americans miss; you're never more than seventy miles from the sea. It's as iconic as, I don't know, Thanksgiving football in the US; it's a thing everyone knows about without explanation.
This is from an album which sold over 1.2m copies in the UK; one of the biggest records of the 90s: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SD8gO8TAr4s