Shipping Forecasts and The Ashes

From this afternoon's BBC Radio 4s More or Less programme presented by the delightful, Tim Harford:

"You may remember that in our New Year's Eve special, sports statistician Bill Edgar from The Times, calculated the chance of key football moments being wiped out by advertisements on ITV, as indeed they were. How we chuckled smugly in our advertising-free zone. But while Radio 4 has no commercial breaks, it does have a break for the Shipping Forecast. As Jack, the not so psychic monkey predicted, England beat Australia three times in the recent Ashes Test series, so what were the chances of all three Radio 4 LW broadcasts being interrupted by the Shipping Forecast right at the moment of English triumph as, alas, happened.

The Shipping Forecast is broadcast twice a night with a total length of twenty minutes. The Test match day is six hours long, overlapping both of those broadcasts. Bill Edgar reckons that this means any randomly chosen moment in the Test match has a 1 in 18 chance of being obscured by the Shipping Forecast. For this to happen three times is a 1 in 18 chance cubed, or a 1 in 5832 chance. There are various possible complicating factors but we and Bill reckon that unlike Mitchell Johnson's bowling, it's fairly accurate."

I love it when one of my fave programmes on my favourite radio station mixes cricket with statistics. A heady cocktail for a Friday afternoon!