Enraged that his barometer was showing set fair when it was pouring with rain, Anthony Eden’s father tore it from the wall and hurled it out of the front door of his house, shouting: “See for yourself, you bloody fool!” Many must feel, as I do, the same impulse towards the human barometers who foretell the weather on television and radio. It’s not just that they often get their forecasts wrong, it’s the manner in which they make them that is so infuriating. There are worthy exceptions, particularly among recent recruits to the profession, but in general this crew of preening prophets can best be described as an absolute shower.
Needless to say, accuracy has improved since Jerome K Jerome denounced the “‘weather forecast’ swindle” in Three Men in a Boat. He attacked newspapers which perpetrated this fraud on the public, memorably describing the excursions and holidays ruined by their cockeyed auguries and damning their “silly, irritating tomfoolishness.” Computerisation and better means of observation have naturally made forecasts more reliable, but even now, meteorologists are disconcertingly fallible. Ten-day forecasts, which are only correct about half the time, appear to amount to little more than guesswork. Or divination, since they are often expressed in oracular terms, the language of the horoscope rather than the anemometer. One giveaway is the forecasters’ frequent use of the tautology “could potentially,” as in “next week could potentially be very hot.”
But for all their jaunty self-confidence, the weather presenters still make mistakes about tomorrow’s “fare,” to use the folksy term favoured by Phil Avery. The most notorious instance was Michael Fish’s failure to foresee the great storm in 1987, the worst in three centuries, which cost 18 lives, destroyed 15m trees and did £2bn worth of damage. Fish’s blunder was not so much his blasé dismissal of fears about a hurricane as his ludicrously understated prediction that it would be “very windy.”
After this debacle, the Met Office set up the National Severe Weather Warning Service, with its coloured cautions, yellow, amber and red. This would be more effective if it were supplemented by an independent assessment, attached to each new forecast, of how accurate in percentage terms the previous one had been. Instead, the unsatisfactory adaptation of the traffic light system has encouraged forecasters to avoid the Fish gaffe by playing up the elements and dramatising their possible impact on the country.
You only have to look at some of them to know that they are frustrated thespians. They regard themselves as part of showbiz, Alex Beresford appearing on Strictly Come Dancing, Siân Lloyd on I’m a Celebrity… Get Me Out of Here! They plainly yearn to strut the stage during an “extreme weather event” which will give full scope to their histrionic talents. In the heated atmosphere generated by climate change, one or two even seem to visualise themselves as impresarios in a cosmic apocalypse, planting their footsteps in the sea and riding upon the storm.
But weather presenters are subject to other fantasies. Some double as counsellors, urging listeners to wrap up well when it’s cold and carry an umbrella when it’s wet. Liam Dutton, one of the best of the bunch, invariably signs off with a superfluous “Take care.” Some give traffic advice, encouraging people to drive cautiously when there’s ice on the road. Some pose as patriots, hoping, with a collusive little simper, that the sun will shine on Royal Ascot. Some are flirtatious, some facetious. Who can forget Helen Willetts’s high-pitched giggle as she dilates on the vagaries of the wind?
All this is doubtless justified as an attempt to give meteorology a human face. And it is true that one doesn’t want the presenters to look like stuffed dummies or sound like speak-your-weight machines. But their reports could be delivered in the lucid, unembellished manner of the BBC news reader. And the presenters themselves could make more effort to purge their bulletins of cliché and verbosity. Fish’s greatest offence was to give popular currency to “misty and murky,” a phrase his successors repeat ad nauseam, as though you can’t have one without the other. Worse still, evening showers are often rendered as “occasional outbreaks of showery rain during the evening hours.”
In the film Groundhog Day, the arrogant weatherman played by Bill Murray is caught in a time loop and has to go on endlessly re-living the same day. It’s tempting to wish a similar fate on today’s weather presenters, who might improve their performances if they were forced to listen to them over and over again. For the viewer at home, of course, once is more than enough.
