‘Hello sir.’
It was Lord West of Spithead, former First Sea Lord and Chief of Naval Staff. During my Royal Naval Reserve days, he was kind of a big deal. He also happens to be the father of my great friend, Will.
‘What are you doing here?’ he enquired. ‘About to climb Everest?’
‘I’m here to be a weather presenter.’ At which point I think I lost his attention and he marched off towards Parliament with a wink.
I was ushered down a narrow corridor, through a high-security door and into a large TV studio, ITV Weather’s dedicated meteorological nerve centre. I had decided that any quest in search of Englishness had to start with a visit to the place we go for our daily weather fix.
‘Hello Ben,’ smiled Lucy Verasamy. ‘Cup of tea?’ she asked (obeying rule one of Englishness).
There was no need for weather small talk here. Lucy is weather. She lives the weather and she loves the weather. ‘What percentage of your life do you spend talking about the weather?’ I asked.
‘About fifty per cent,’ she smiled.
When it comes to dinner-party conversation, Lucy’s job must make her the best guest. All her weather small talk is big talk. She knows everything about it. She positively oozes weather fanaticism, speaking at 100mph. I thought I was good at talking until I met Lucy.
‘Do you want to see the studio?’
I felt like a child in a sweet shop. I’m sure I’m not supposed to be this thrilled by a weather studio, but apparently I’m not alone. ‘People do get pretty excited,’ she admitted as we walked into a large empty room with a huge green piece of fabric hanging from the wall. ‘Same one Harry Potter’s cloak was made from,’ she winked.
She walked onto her presenting mark and immediately an image of her standing in front of a large map of the British Isles appeared on one of the monitors. This is the picture of the professional weather presenter we’re used to seeing.
Given that we can now access the weather from multiple sources, I wondered what the role of a weather presenter is in 2017.
‘You can get weather apps, weather online, weather in social media, in the papers, on the radio,’ she explained, ‘but the weather presenter’s role is to interpret that data and translate it for our viewers.’ A digital weather report can’t predict humidity, hay fever risk and all the other important effects of the conditions on our lives.
‘What’s the most common question?’
‘“Is it going to snow at Christmas?” followed by “Will it be a hot summer?”’
You can’t say we aren’t predictable.
Of course, all weather presenters are now marked by the most notorious weather-presenting ‘moment’ on 15 October 1987, when Michael Fish got the forecast wrong in spectacular style. ‘Earlier today a woman rang the BBC and said she’d heard there was a hurricane on the way. Don’t worry. There isn’t,’ he announced cheerily during the weather slot on the One O’Clock News that day. That night, force 11 winds gusted across the south of England for several hours, uprooting 15 million trees and causing total mayhem. Fish’s legendary ‘blooper forecast’ has since had more than half a million hits on YouTube.
In a typically English way, Fish has lived up to the ‘gaffe’ – though he maintains he was talking about a different storm system over the North Atlantic which didn’t reach England, not the depression from the Bay of Biscay that caused the damage. He makes regular appearances on comedy shows, reliving the ‘hurricane blooper’ with self-deprecating humour. Thanks to the bankability of weather as a topic of interest to the English, the controversy has spun its own cultural sideshow. The term ‘the Michael effect’ was coined for the tendency ever since of weather presenters to predict a worst-case scenario in order to avoid being caught out. Fish appeared as guest presenter of the weather news on the twentieth anniversary of the Great Storm. A clip of his original bulletin was immortalized and given global exposure as part of a video montage in the opening ceremony of the London 2012 Summer Olympics.
Back in the 1980s and early 90s, weathermen really were a big deal. Ulrika Jonsson began her career as a ‘weather girl’, becoming the nation’s sweetheart. Michael Fish’s weather rival was John Kettley, and together they were immortalized in a 1988 novelty hit by A Tribe of Toffs from Sunderland, ‘John Kettley is a Weatherman’:
John Kettley is a weatherman
a weatherman
a weatherman
John Kettley is a weatherman
And so is Michael Fish
‘People still talk about Michael Fish,’ Lucy marvels, ‘even people who weren’t born till after the storm.’ It’s one of my first observations about our obsession with the weather that weather forecasters can become national treasures. Lucy trained under the eye of another great weatherman, Francis Wilson. Amongst Francis’ many accolades is he was the first to use computer-generated graphics on British television.
‘Have a go on the weather map,’ Lucy says. ‘Use the map, but engage with the audience,’ she explains as I stand in front of the invisible map ‘hidden’ in the green screen. I glance at the monitor and there, in full Technicolor glory, is my face and arms, gesticulating to the map.
‘We are one of the few live TV broadcasts not to use autocue,’ she says with pride.
Behind me on the television monitor is a map of Britain with moving weather arrows to show the direction of wind, and large green patches to show the rain and showers. More easily identifiable are the yellow and orange circles showing the temperature – the deeper the orange, the hotter the forecast temperature.
‘It will begin cool in the south before getting warmer.’ My attempt at presenting makes me feel slightly fraudulent. And then I remember that ITV Weather alone has 15 million viewers a week and realize the responsibility of the job.
The problem with Britain is that most of the big weather is in the north, while the majority of the dense populations are in the south. The result for a weather presenter can be arms waving wildly high and low on the map, like some Karate Kid impersonation. ‘Francis always told me not to look like I was dancing or chopping with my arms,’ Lucy explains.
‘People love to grumble about the weather,’ she smiles, ‘too hot, too cold, too windy. I suppose it plays up to our national stereotype of a nation of grumblers.’ Interestingly, she attributes the vast number of weather apps now available to our eternal search for ‘the right weather’: if people don’t like a weather prediction, they will look for one that suits them. Trying to tame the untameable weather.
Lucy explains that there are several features that make the English weather what it is, changeable and famously unpredictable. As part of the United Kingdom, England lies between latitudes 50 and 56 degrees north. An island country, it sits on the western seaboard of the continent of Europe, surrounded by sea. The English live at a point where competing air masses meet, creating atmospheric instability and unsettled weather. In The Teatime Islands, my first book, I described England/Britain from the perspective of a faraway outpost as ‘this small rainy island in Western Europe’.
On the other side of the country, our geographical position on the edge of the Atlantic places us at the end of a storm track, a relatively narrow area of ocean down which storms travel, driven by the prevailing winds. As the warm and cold air fly towards and over each other, the earth’s rotation creates cyclones and the UK bears the tail end of them.
What makes our climate so mild is the Gulf Stream, which raises the temperature in the UK by up to 5°C in winter. It also adds moisture to the atmosphere, which makes it much harder to predict the weather as it adds to the number of variables that need to be forecast.
These