In the library at the Met Office’s shiny headquarters in Exeter, you’ll find a bit of old newspaper in a frame. The cutting from the Times, dated 1 August 1861, describes “general weather probable during next two days” (in summary: bit windy, sunny). It was brief and included no map, but made history as the world’s first daily weather forecast.
More than 150 years, countless magnetic clouds and one unheralded hurricane later, the weather game has changed a lot. But, for generations of viewers, there will always be a golden age when the sun shone brightly on the increasingly grizzled features of Michael Fish and Ian McCaskill, who has died aged 78.
“You have to remember that in the old days, when Ian and I became quite well-known, we were on television a lot,” Fish says from his home in Twickenham. “There were just the three of us, including Jack Scott, and we often had audiences of 18 million people. We were in people’s homes all day.”
Fish, 72, who appeared on television for 30 years until 2004, says forecasters who emerged in the 1970s developed dual personalities. “You would see Ian in our office going over the data as a serious civil meteorologist of the old school,” he recalls. “Then he went into the studio and became a comedian and a broadcaster. It was very difficult to do.”
Weather made celebrities of civil servants, who had begun TV broadcasts in 1954, when George Cowling waved a wax crayon over paper charts. Fish started in 1974, four years before McCaskill, who later received the ultimate celebrity endorsement of the time: a Spitting Image puppet. “You had to be something of a personality because the public had the power to switch you off,” Fish says.
That has never been truer today, as forecasts are blown across a new media landscape. But the current generation believes they are still vital. “I think people still want and expect to see us pop up at the end of the news,” says Liam Dutton, 36, the Channel 4 News weather presenter. He says that the relationship with viewers is closer now. “Social media means we can elaborate on things. I get asked to explain things or to tell someone about a cloud they saw on the way to work.”
Alex Deakin, 42, presented weather on the BBC from 2000 until this year, when he moved to the Met Office as part of its own growing output online and in apps. The agency’s 95-year relationship with the BBC ends next spring, when MeteoGroup takes on the contract. Deakin, who credits McCaskill as a hero and an inspiration, believes the weather presenter as we have always known it will stand firm amid digital revolutions and commercial pressures. “However good the graphics and data gets, I think we are always going to want a trained forecaster to interpret and explain what the computer is saying,” he says.
