The first-ever radio weather bulletin was read out to listeners to the British Broadcasting Corporation on November 14, 1922, from a text supplied by the Met Office. It wasn’t until the following March, however, that daily reports began to be issued. In November 1936, the first televised chart was shown to that tiny handful of the population that possessed a TV. Viewers saw a disembodied hand drawing isobars on a chart, while a voice speaking in pure pre-war BBC narrated the forecast.

It was only after the second world war, in 1949, that daily weather charts with captions began to be shown.

The innovation for which the BBC weather forecast has been famous ever since happened in 1954. At 7.55pm on January 11, the first on-camera weather presenter, 32-year-old George Cowling, made his debut. The new-look presentation, which was allocated an extravagant five minutes of broadcast time, rather than the normal few seconds, was given an explanatory fanfare in the Radio Times:

“From Monday onwards the television weather report and forecast will be presented by a Meteorological Office forecaster who will explain and comment on the charts shown. The change is designed to stress the continuity of the reports provided; the forecaster will show, for example, how the weather expected tomorrow is conditioned by the weather experienced today.”

The homely touch with which weather presenting has been associated ever since was announced in that first broadcast, when Cowling told viewers that high winds the following day would make it a good day for hanging out washing. With that one aside, the weather report stopped being a purely scientific matter, and was addressed instead to the expectations, fascination and travel plans of the general public.

Cowling shared presentational duties during this formative period with an older colleague, Tom Clifton.

In 1959, the London Weather Centre opened and, from this time on, weather presenters on the radio were chosen from among its staff. The London centre launched Michael Fish on a long and distinguished career, the longest so far in broadcast meteorology (1972-2004).

Gadgets and graphics

When colour television arrived in 1967, it brought a whole new approach to weather presenting with it. Eventually, magnetic symbols came into play, including the famous cloud with a little hesitant sun peeping out from behind it for the classic British combination of sunshine and showers. A downward-pointing triangle represented unmixed rain, snow was a large white asterisk, and a lightning bolt naturally signified thunderstorms. The only weather condition that completely stumped the inventive capabilities of the Met Office was fog, for which the final resort was simply the word “FOG”.

TV weather presenting was an all-male profession until 1974, when the BBC transferred Barbara Edwards from Radio 4 to the screen.

In 1985, the magnetic symbols were abandoned, Michael Fish overseeing their final outing on the screen. The brave new world of computer graphics was upon us, and has continued to be refined ever since. In 2005, the BBC unwittingly upset many Scottish viewers when it unveiled its new graphic map, which appeared to be a long view up the country from the vantage-point of the English south coast, leaving Scotland looking like a tiny, distant enclave. Some hasty fine-tuning of the graphics quelled some of the indignation, but it is fair to say that the new system hasn’t found firm favour with viewers.

Family favourites

Among weather presenters the nation took to its hearts over the years, apart from Fish, were:

• Bill Giles, whose homely, no-nonsense style of presentation was often rounded off with a knowing wink to the camera.
  
  
• Tall, bearded northerner John Kettley.
  
  
• Scot Ian McCaskill, whose breathless style of delivery, as though he always had somewhere else he urgently needed to be, endeared him to viewers throughout a 20-year reign.

The great storm of 1987: the truth

And on the question of what has often been seen as the most famous blooper in weather forecasting history, when Michael Fish apparently reassured the nation on October 15, 1987, that there wasn’t going to be a hurricane, hours before southern England was battered by the worst storm in modern history, the remark really was taken out of context.

Fish was referring to conditions in Florida as a link to a story that had been on the news about storm damage in the Caribbean. With regard to the domestic weather, he actually said in the same report, “Batten down the hatches, there’s some really stormy weather on the way,” but that part of the clip is never shown.