“Thames, Dover, Wight, Portland, Plymouth, Biscay; south-Westerly gales eight to storm ten, occasionally violent…” The ominous words that once might have struck fear into a sailor's soul and seen crews scramble to batten down the hatches.

Yet when this warning aired at 00:43 last Sunday, few noticed. Even fewer cared. We know because it didn’t take an endangered fisherman recklessly blown off course to point out that the BBC had repeated exactly the same forecast from 20 hours earlier. Instead that was left to the pricked ears of a listener from Inverness, who earnestly wondered if he was “the only sad person to spot it?”

Well, David Newton, it appears you were. And your sadness shows exactly why the time has come to end this most outdated of meteorological pastimes.

It is not 1920. Britain no longer has colonies to serve. And the shipping forecast is no longer relevant. Yet for years, its dulcet tones have been defended by middle class insomniacs and misty-eyed romantics eager to believe that, while they lie in their beds unable to sleep, lonely sailors marooned on storm-ravaged seas are fine tuning the needle of their AM transistors to assess their chances of lasting the night.

And so for too many years the forecast’s sleep-inducing strains have been allowed to interrupt critical moments of Test Match cricket commentary, gobble hours of license fee paying airtime and sold itself on the ticket that Royal Britannia still, somehow, rules the waves.

Worse still is the rampant hypocrisy of it all. Compare it to Radio Four's Thought for the Day, which evokes such criticms that you wonder if the BBC’s refusal to allow non-believers on the morning slot poses more of a threat to mankind than nuclear weapons (it doesn’t). Yet the shipping forecast escapes the same rational interrogation. Why? Perhaps because weather forecasts, humanists would argue, have more real-world relevance than enduring a morning's radio appointment with the Vicar of Putney.

But it's time that was rethought too. Because given the choice between hearning someone’s religious convictions, or a protracted string of incomprehensible meteorological babble, I know which I find more insulting. And in a digital age where sailors are more likely to be scouring feeds from the Maritime Coastguard Agency than waiting for the next gap in the radio scheduling to find out what the elements have in store, it's time to get real. There is only one self-appointed voice of God that is landing on deaf ears. And it’s not the Vicar of Putney’s.

ADMIT IT, Nick Griffin makes riveting television. His views are blunt and binary. He sweats under studio lights and smiles at the most inappropriate moments. When he applauds a point, he claps like an otter. And it’s no coincidence that his appearance on Question Time drew almost eight million people – more than treble the regular Thursday night audience.

Such populist pantomime made for high-octane viewing. But it should not be mistaken as a victory for democracy. And it certainly didn’t give the party the rope with which to hang.

For like it or not, Griffin was not "trounced" on Question Time. His views were intellectually unpicked. He was condemned across parties and attacked by an angry audience. But other than feel-good television for the pre-converted, the programme did little else other than reaffirm what most suspected: that beneath the poppy-clad suit was still a man who reckons Winston Churchill would be in his membership books, and that a non-violent Ku Klux Klan member is anything but an oxymoron.

So now what? Where does this leave the majority of people that cherish a multicultural, free society? They are reminded that the BNP are still a pack of racist wolves in sheep’s clothing. They can congratulate themselves for advocating free speech and, spurred by the BBC’s obsession with obeying its charter, cling to the ideal that “democracy won the day”. But that is ultimately meaningless, given that most of these people would never have voted for the BNP in the first place.

Now consider those that had not discounted voting for the party. Or those vast swathes of disenfranchised electorates that wake up every morning on the wrong side of crippling class poverty and an unrelenting recession. Seeing Griffin parachuted onto the top table of the BBC’s flagship political programme to fight their corner is one thing. Taking his seat alongside the three main parties bereft of any clearer alternatives is another. These are milestones steeped with symbolic inferences, ones that forever dispel the old party image of a bunch of angry Englishmen that hold clandestine meetings in the back room of a boozer, and catapults them closer towards mainstream political legitimacy. If they have not arrived there already.

I'm all for free speech, but the BBC handled this disastrously. Hellbent on its “responsibility of due impartiality”, it could easily have tested the potency of this powder keg with a lower-profile radio airing on Radio Four's Any Questions. Instead it reached straight for the petrol can with a box office special that pulled in eight million viewers and provided a gift of scattergun publicity. Faced with such exposure it was hardly surprising that all three leaders of the main parties were eager to condemn the BNP, while quietly jostling for their own electoral high-ground. And it was here where Griffin capitalised, portraying himself as the “most loathed man in Britain” while tapping into prevalent dissatisfaction in the political landscape.

Nowhere did this strike harder than when the parties bickered over immigration.The shadow minister for community cohesion Sayeeda Warsi floated the issue, saying Labour “ignores voters concerns”. Chris Huhne, the Liberal Democrat home affairs spokesman, condemned the government for “shambolic” failings and suddenly – shock horror – it was left to Griffin to exploit the vortex and decree that no one party was to blame. It comes as no surprise today that a YouGov poll suggests one fifth of voters “would consider” the BNP in wake of the broadcast.

Because in the end, this was not about the nuances of debate on the night. The fact is that when faced with the most intensely shining spotlight, Griffin held court, elicit sympathy and survived sixty-minutes without any major blunder beyond some odious views. That, in the world of Question Time, is like a wildcard football team holding the World Cup champions to a draw. They might as well consider themselves the winners.