‘History appears as the derailment, the disruption of the
everyday … History changes, the everyday remains’
Karel Kosík 1
The writer and politician Michael Ignatieff once complained that ‘most of us no longer watch television; we graze, zapping back and forth between channels whenever our boredom threshold is triggered … A new culture has taken shape which caters for people with the attention span of a flea.’2 But there is one programme that seems to have survived and prospered in what Ignatieff called this ‘three-minute culture’, perhaps because it lasts only about three minutes: the weather forecast. Watching or listening to tomorrow’s outlook remains an undying national ritual. There has been a forecast on the BBC almost every day since 26 March 1923. The exception was during the Second World War, when the radio forecast was suspended in case it was helpful to the enemy, although the government partially relented in October 1944, allowing information to be given about the weather the day before yesterday. ‘Most people,’ the BBC bulletin stated laconically on the day the ban was lifted, ‘will have cause to remember it because in most parts of the country it just rained and rained.’3
The forecast is now one of the longest-running programmes on British television, and, despite all the competing sources of weather information, it remains popular: 26.3 million people will see at least one BBC weather forecast in any one month.4 The forecast after the late-evening news is the most popular of all, with hundreds of thousands of people tuning in at the end of the news especially to watch it. ‘Popular’ is perhaps the wrong word, though, for moaning about the supposed inaccuracy and poor presentation of the forecast is also something of a national pastime. The problem is that viewers have always wanted clarity and predictability in a weather system that is essentially opaque and unpredictable. And how do you represent a dynamic phenomenon like the weather in summary form? Early BBC television forecasts used simple charts and captions, with only a disembodied, Monty-Pythonesque hand coming in from one side to point at the relevant bits. When George Cowling presented the first manned forecast in 1954, he and his colleagues would draw the weather symbols on cardboard charts with felt-tip pens, then he would roll them up and take them by tube train from the London Weather Centre in Kingsway to the BBC’s Shepherd’s Bush studios. During the bulletin itself, Cowling scribbled over the chart with a charcoal stick to show the weather changing.
The forecasters drew all their own charts until 1967, when they introduced magnetic rubber symbols filled with iron filings, which could be stuck on to steel maps. The symbols themselves were not exactly viewer-friendly, being based on international meteorological iconography such as triangles for showers, round dots for rain and black strips for isobars. In 1975, these symbols were dramatically simplified. Now we had the weather as drawn by a technically proficient six-year-old: fluffy clouds (both white and black, to indicate the chance of rain), pear-like raindrops, white asterisks for snowflakes, and suns with orange circles and lines radiating outwards. But the magnetic symbols were not much better than hand-drawn charts at indicating changing weather. When the forecaster tried to place a black cloud on top of a white one to indicate incoming rain, the magnetic polarity was often reversed and it would fall off.
In 1985, the BBC replaced these symbols with a computer system known as ‘colour separation overlay’. In CSO, the forecaster stands in front of a large blue screen, and any area that the camera detects as blue is replaced by a feed from a computerised weather map. Anything non-blue remains the same, so forecasters seem to be standing in front of the map (if they wore blue clothing, they would disappear). At last, television had found a way of integrating a moving weather map with a human narrator. What has really transformed the weather forecast in recent years, however, is not technology but the commercialisation of television and the rise of the personality forecaster. This reflected a classically Thatcherite challenge to traditional professional expertise by market values – but the contest was not quite as straightforward as it first seemed.
The BBC Met Office forecasters were (and remain) career civil servants with corresponding ranks in the RAF, but they also became celebrities by default, simply because they entered people’s living rooms for a few minutes every day. Along with the onscreen continuity announcers, the weather forecasters were some of the first TV personalities, and this eventually made it easier to accept newsreaders as personalities as well – a significant cultural shift. Lord Reith had created the traditional news announcer in the 1920s in an attempt to give the corporation a responsible public face and thus shake off government controls. News announcers, he ordered, would be ‘shadowy personalities … aloof and mysterious, who must forgo the desire for notoriety and recognition’.5 They had to wear evening dress (on the radio), speak in received southern pronunciation and remain strictly anonymous. Reith wanted BBC news to avoid the strident voice and restless search for drama and human interest found in newspapers. A Good Friday news bulletin in 1930 simply stated, ‘There is no news tonight.’6 Anonymity inspired a presenting style which Collie Knox, Daily Mail journalist and fierce BBC critic, described as the ‘bored, listless manner of a dying duck’.7 During the war, news announcers gave their names so that they were less likely to be confused with enemy saboteurs, but on 4 May 1945 the announcer said, ‘Here is the news – and this is Stuart Hibberd reading it’ for the last time, before returning to obscurity.8
Even on television, the BBC did not initially provide pictures for the news. When the first in-vision newsreaders appeared in 1955, they kept their heads down and remained expressionless. According to an audience survey of June 1957, viewers supported the idea of ‘dispassionate news reading’ but complained that newsreaders often ‘sounded uninterested’.9 Eventually, news producers realised that it was incongruous to strive for complete impersonality when the weather forecasters who followed the news were becoming personalities.10 Not that they were necessarily captivating performers. ‘Weather men on television usually walk on looking like a depression over Iceland,’ complained one newspaper columnist in 1968. ‘They point at maps and chat about isobars. Even their smiles seem frozen.’11 In the early years of television news and weather forecasting, viewers were eager to have more of a relationship with these familiar faces. For various reasons the presenters remained standoffish, but it was the forecasters who thawed first.
Bert Foord, who joined the BBC weather team in 1963, was the first forecaster to achieve celebrity status, largely because of his distinctive northern accent and avuncular manner. On one occasion, Foord had to follow a farming programme about lambing techniques. He opened with the line ‘From soapflakes to snowflakes’, which caused a minor scandal when the easily amused continuity announcer, Valerie Singleton, laughed on air. The chil- dren’s programme The Magic Roundabout often ended with Florence reminding Zebedee and Dougal that Bert Foord was waiting to give the forecast.12 When Foord left the BBC in 1974, Terry Wogan launched a ‘Bring Back Bert Foord’ campaign on Radio 2, claiming that the weather itself had got worse since he had stopped forecasting. Tellingly, his professional career had won out over media stardom: Foord had simply given up television after being promoted within the Met Office.13
The launch of breakfast television in 1983 was a key moment in the rise of the personality forecaster. The BBC had the Met Office dreamboat and housewives’ favourite Francis Wilson. ITV had a member of the old school, a retired naval commander called David Philpott. But it soon shunted him to weekends to make way for Wincey Willis, who would intersperse her weather reports with little anecdotes about her dog or her mother’s arthritis. The new breakfast and satellite stations gave disproportionate time to the weather, because it was cheap and could be endlessly repeated for channel-hopping viewers. As the weather took up more airtime, the late 1980s saw a new breed of glamorous ‘weathergirls’, like TV-am’s Ulrika Jonsson and Sky TV’s Tania Bryer, who were cruelly nicknamed ‘Brolly Dollies’ and ‘Tracey Sunshines’. Programme makers realised that the novelty weather forecast was a cheap way of drawing viewers into a programme. On the daytime show This Morning, the weatherman Fred Talbot did his forecast from a floating map of Britain in Liverpool’s Albert Dock. With his weather-themed woolly jumpers and hyperactive manner, Talbot became a cult figure. The most famous part of his forecast, a not particularly death-defying leap over the water to Northern Ireland, was described by one excitable commentator as ‘subliminal propaganda for an end to the Union’.14
The inspiration for these light-hearted forecasts came from American television, where meteorological expertise had never quite taken hold. In the 1950s, US weather-casters delivered the forecast in verse or with the aid of puppets. One attractive female weathercaster, dressed in a short nightie, tucked herself into bed each night while delivering the late forecast.15 The American Meteorological Society tried to establish a Seal of Approval programme in 1957 to promote reliability and professionalism among forecasters, but it was largely ignored by ratings-conscious broadcasters. Gimmicky forecasting waned slightly in the 1960s, but American stations still dressed their forecasters in demonstrative costumes – umbrellas and mackintoshes for rain, bathing suits and flip-flops for sun – or sent them outside in gales and blizzards for comic effect.16 Often a dog or cat would appear as the weathercaster, dressed appropriately for the weather, with an off-camera announcer providing the voice.17
But the arrival in Britain of what Americans call ‘weather-tainment’ may actually have saved the forecast from obsolescence. In the 1960s, the personalised forecast was an endangered species. There were only three weather bulletins a day on BBC television and there was much managerial pressure to reduce their length to make way for more popular programmes. At one time the length of the main national forecast fell to just thirty seconds. For a week in 1969, the BBC reverted to a weather chart with a voiceover, until viewers responded angrily and the weathermen returned.18 It was really the putative celebrity of Bert Foord and others that rescued the forecast from being more than just a grudgingly delivered summary.
Under the new commercial pressures of the Thatcher era, many remained worried that public-service items like news and weather would be replaced by cheap fillers and audience-grabbers. In fact, the opposite happened: the ‘boring’ news and weather forecast were enlisted to fight increasingly fierce ratings battles in the multi-channel environment of cable and satellite TV. ITN, for example, only got round to doing a national forecast in February 1989. They were helped by the Thatcherite liberalisation of programme sponsorship, which allowed the energy company Powergen to affix its logo to the forecast in 1990, promising ‘electricity whatever the weather’.
Unlike the more lightweight subscription and breakfast channels, ITN offered a serious competitor to the BBC forecast. Its attitude to the weather was the same as its approach to the news: professional presentation combined with a chatty, human-interest style. For Alex Hill, the Met Office man who made the first ITN forecast, anticyclones were ‘highs’, precipitation was ‘a great, malignant swathe of rain’, and frontal systems were ‘a baleful banana of cloud’.19 Around this time, the BBC’s producer of weather programmes, John Teather, accepted that forecasters had to make a connection with their audience: ‘It’s an undefined talent. The term for it in the 1930s was the “It” factor. The presenter is that person who walks into the room and makes everyone’s head turn.’20 It was hard to imagine the older generation of BBC forecasters, with their tweed jackets, kipper ties and seventies haircuts, having the ‘It’ factor. Rather, it was the ordinariness of the forecasters that made them celebrities – although one of the younger members of the team did become an unlikely youth icon after the 1988 Tribe of Toffs hit, ‘John Kettley is a weatherman’.
When George Cowling once let slip in a 1950s forecast that tomorrow would be a good day for drying the washing, he received a reproving phone call from his superior at the Met Office.21 But in the 1990s, such casual asides became an almost compulsory element of the forecast. The weather was no longer an abstract phenomenon; it had to be related to potential activities like gardening or going to the Test Match. The forecast became distinctly nannyish. We were told to ‘go slow on those motorways’, ‘take care on those icy pavements if you’re out and about’ and ‘put on some layers if you’re taking the dog for a walk’. The padded out forecast also became a source of new, previously unconsidered anxieties about ultraviolet radiation, poor air quality and high pollen counts. But larger anxieties, like climate change, rarely intruded: Britain’s weather is actually a poor indicator of global warming because it is so unpredictable.
In fact, the forecast tends to inspire a certain resignation about the weather; certainly, it conveys little sense that our climate could be altered by human intervention. As Mark Twain (or George Axelrod, or numerous other people) is supposed to have said, ‘Everyone talks about the weather, but no one does anything about it.’ The forecast is similarly fatalistic: coming after the chaotic disruption to diurnal routine represented by the items on the TV news, it calmly restores the timeless rhythms of the everyday. The forecasters are rather apologetic on the weather’s behalf (‘more rain again, I’m afraid’) but quietly insistent about its narrative logic. Tomorrow’s weather is an inescapable denouement, described in those strange, unowned verb forms (‘rain spreading from the west … strengthening through the night … brightening up later … turning colder’). The news involves us in its problems and dilemmas and invites us to have a position on them; but no one is to blame for the rain. The American author Paul Theroux once noted that the British in particular tend to personify the weather, suggesting that it is either working for or against us, but in a diffident, undramatic way: ‘The weather’s been letting us down … It’s been trying to rain all day … The sun’s been trying to come out.’22
This phlegmatic attitude has traditionally translated into ideas about our national identity. The historian Robert Colls argues that Britain’s temperate climate has often been seen as ‘the barometer of a true liberal civilization’, used to explain our generally placid national character and moderate political system. In 1935, the popular philosopher and broadcaster C. E. M. Joad argued that the ‘true spirit of England’ could be found in its ‘soft, hazy, gentle’ climate. In less thoughtful hands than Joad’s, this climatological determinism could be used to associate more extreme weather patterns with non-democratic, intolerant political systems. The blazing African sun went logically with slavery and despotism, harsh Russian winters with serfdom and totalitarianism.23 Even today, the forecast offers a muted form of this national exceptionalism. When we do have extreme weather, it can be blamed on somewhere else, whether it is cold winds from the Arctic or Siberia, rain from the Atlantic or hot winds from the Continent. The language of the British forecast is fuzzily approximate, like those timeless alliterative standbys ‘sunny spells’ and ‘scattered showers’. British weather may be bad but, in contrast to other parts of the world, it is rarely a matter of life and death.
The consoling, cyclical qualities of the weather forecast are not to everyone’s taste. In March 2005, BBC2’s current affairs flagship, Newsnight, decided to introduce a weather forecast at the end of the programme, to the apparent disdain of its presenter, Jeremy Paxman. During one forecast he curtly announced ‘a veritable smorgasbord. Sun. Rain. Thunder. Hail. Snow. Cold. Wind. Not worth going to work really.’ During another, he raced through a similar list before brusquely concluding, ‘It’s April, what do you expect?’ Newsnight’s forecast had replaced the summary of the financial markets, a largely meaningless ritual to everyone but commodity brokers, who presumably have more sophisticated ways of accessing this information. The financial summary is really an upmarket version of the weather forecast: a daily sacrament given at the end of news reports, it sees the fluctuations of the FTSE or the Dow-Jones as an uncontrollable force of nature which only experts can decipher. But Newsnight viewers protested on the programme’s website about the disappearance of the ‘grown-up’ market summary and the ‘dumbing down’ of the programme. In response, Newsnight organised an onscreen hustings – with ex-chancellor Norman Lamont speaking up for the markets and ex-forecaster Michael Fish for the weather – followed by a phone-in poll. After a conclusive vote of 68 to 32 per cent, the market report was reinstated and the forecast dropped.
The Newsnight controversy was a light shower compared to the storm brewing about the weather forecasts on the rest of the BBC. In May 2005, for the first time in twenty years, the corporation seriously revamped its forecasts, claiming that audience research showed that viewers found the traditional format ‘old-fashioned’ and ‘boring’.24 It ditched its familiar 2D weather symbols and map for a high-tech, virtual-reality graphics system. Suddenly the forecast was dynamically mobile. Dark shadows moved across the map to represent clouds, shafts of light denoted sunshine, and rain fell down in realistic drops. The graphics system also moved around Britain to give viewers a kind of aerial tour of their own regions. The dull scientific stuff, like those wavy lines representing air pressure, was dumped. Colin Tregear, the BBC Weather Centre’s director, explained bullishly, ‘It’s not a geography lesson, it’s a weather forecast.’25
The BBC switchboard was deluged with thousands of complaints. Some viewers were getting motion sickness from the fast-moving graphics. The ‘fly-through’ facility meant that people had to wait too long to see their part of the country. England’s green and pleasant land had been turned the colour of a cowpat, a ‘sandy’ or ‘golden’ shade having been chosen because it showed up contrasts clearly. Most controversially, the map had a tilt to take account of the curvature of the Earth, which appeared to downsize northern England and Scotland. It had long been a piece of popular folklore that the weather forecast concentrated unduly on the South-East at the expense of the regions, and here at last was hard evidence. The voice of middle England, the Daily Mail, was atypically outraged on behalf of the Celtic fringes. ‘Are people in the North,’ it wrote, ‘going to be offered a reduction in their licence fee?’26 One Scottish National Party MP tabled a House of Commons motion protesting against the tilt. During a debate in the Lords about the new forecasts, a peer asked, ‘Will my noble friend consider looking into the gravely suspicious circumstance that if you pay for it, the weather always seems better on Sky?’27
Perhaps conscious of its need to justify the licence fee when its charter was up for renewal, the BBC quickly responded to the furore. In deference to its traditional Reithian mission to educate and inform, it brought back some of the old symbols denoting wind speeds and air pressure; it reduced the speed at which the map zoomed around the country, to appease those with delicate stomachs; and it partially corrected the Earth’s tilt, giving the North more prominence. Alex Salmond, the Scottish National Party leader, said proudly, ‘The BBC has been undone by the Western Isles whirlwind. It is great to see that Scottish pressure has made the BBC think again.’28
Why was everyone so upset about some trivial changes to a programme that lasts only for a few minutes? The controversy is puzzling because, contrary to popular belief, the British are not unusually obsessed with the weather. The American Weather Channel, for example, is regularly in the top-ten cable channels, but when it launched a sister channel in Britain in 1996, viewer indifference closed it down within eighteen months. In a 1992 BBC documentary about the weather, a statistician rang people immediately after they had watched the weather forecast, and discovered that 70 per cent of them could not remember a thing about it.29 People who actually needed to know the forecast, such as farmers and fishermen, had only marginally better recall. When, in 1976, a similar telephone survey was conducted in Minneapolis and St Paul in America just after the early evening weather forecast, half of viewers ‘retained a general notion of what the next day’s weather would be’.30 Perhaps the talking dogs had a mnemonic effect.
Lifestyle changes in recent years have also meant that the weather affects us less and less – at the same time as knowledge of impending weather has become extremely important to the businesses that manage our lifestyles. An interesting example of this disjuncture is the way that producers of forecasts have tried to make the language more precise in recent years, by adopting the American practice of citing probabilities (‘an 80 per cent chance of showers’). These percentages are produced by ensemble forecasting, which uses computers to compile different simulations based on minuscule adjustments. The language of probabilities is useful to companies who need figures to enter into software programs that will help them make business decisions. But it is not much help to the rest of us: we just want to know whether to take a brolly. Nowadays, long-term forecasting is the important commodity and is only available to people who are prepared to pay for it. Under the Thatcher government, the Met Office became an executive agency, allowing it to run itself as a business with its own budget. So it was well placed to exploit the emerging business of weather risk management, as our just-in-time economy demanded that products be delivered to their selling points at short notice. The Met Office provides data which tells supermarkets whether to stock up on ice cream, salad and shower gel, or hot-water bottles, women’s tights and de-icer. In a sense, these people make it their business to worry about the weather so that the rest of us do not have to, except insofar as it influences our lifestyle choices.
Since we rarely need to know what the weather is going to be like tomorrow, the television forecast is now essentially ritualistic: it follows a familiar format, with the same introductory music, graphics, verbal tics and sign-offs from the forecaster. Linguists call it phatic communication, a more sophisticated version of the pleasantries that people exchange about the weather like ‘it’s too cold to snow’ or ‘it’s too hot for me’, which serve more as conversational fillers than genuine attempts to communicate. Six months after the uproar over the BBC weather map, some confidential new Met Office guidelines for television forecasters were leaked to the press. They advised against overly gloomy descriptions of the weather: ‘chilly in areas’ should now be characterised as ‘warm for most’, while ‘isolated storms’ should become ‘hot and sunny for most’. Other terms to be avoided included ‘heavy rain’ (now to be described as ‘rain’), ‘occasional showers’ (‘mainly dry’) and ‘often cloudy’ (‘generally clear’).31 An inappropriate spin on bad news, perhaps – but all these guidelines really suggested was replacing one set of vague approximations with another. A statistician recently worked out that, if weather forecasters used the standard, fuzzy phraseology, they could provide an accurate forecast for 41 per cent of the time simply by repeating exactly what they had said the previous day.32
Perhaps it is this iterative quality of the weather forecast that explains our emotional attachment to it. Despite the proliferation of TV channels, the BBC still has an important symbolic role as the mediator of national rituals, from special occasions like royal weddings to daily events like weather forecasts. And people do not take kindly to sudden, unrequested changes in their quotidian routines. The persistence of the forecast in all our daily lives invites nostalgic reminiscence. Compared to their predecessors, today’s forecasters seem personable but bland, a series of interchangeable Helens and Darrens, of similar ages, mannerisms and haircuts. In time, no doubt, they will become familiar and loved, and we will rail against their successors. But for now this cuts no ice. Where are the snows (and the Michael Fishes) of yesteryear?
Like many other daily rituals, the weather forecast is taken for granted – but as the BBC found with the affair of the tilt, we notice when it changes. The growth of cable and satellite TV stations, and the opening up of the radio airwaves, generated massive demand for forecasters, and for innovative ways of presenting the weather. But the most extreme forms of weather-tainment, from floating maps to brolly dollies, seem to have had their day in the sun. We still rely on the BBC’s trusty Met Office forecasters, and don’t like it when they experiment with whizzy graphics and a curved planet. There are only so many ways in which you can say it is going to rain and, whatever they might suggest in the House of Lords, the weather is no better on pay-per-view. Most viewers just want to know what the weather is going to be like – or perhaps to go through the motions of being told what it is going to be like. The late-evening weather forecast is the televisual equivalent of a warm bath and a mug of hot milk, a reassuring ritual for rounding off the day. Now you have been told the outlook for tomorrow, you can safely go upstairs to bed.