Thank goodness the BBC has announced that the Met Office has lost its weather contract with the corporation before announcing who has won it. Why? Because this leaves a window of opportunity, however narrow, for Broadcasting House to see sense and outsource this service not to the best weather forecaster but to the forecaster of the best weather.
In LA Story, Steve Martin’s seminal study of real life in Los Angeles, he plays a weatherman who pre-records large numbers of forecasts, liberating him to take extended breaks from the office for romance and to commune with freeway billboards. The whole thing takes place under balmy skies because they are always balmy in LA.
Britain’s weather is less predictable, as our forecasters constantly remind us by failing to predict it. Generally speaking, this doesn’t matter. Being caught out in the rain is part of being British. This being so there is surely a market opportunity for a forecaster who compensates for inaccuracy not with apologies after the event but optimism before it.
As the nation contemplates a BBC without the Met Office for the first time in 94 years, Michael Fish is being castigated once again for failing to forecast the hurricane of 1987. Yet his real sin was not being wrong but being inconsistent. Sometimes he was right. If everyone had been used to nothing more or less from Mr Fish than a daily prayer for sea breeze and sunshine, no one would have noticed his mistake.
Some will argue that the weather is far too serious to be left to showmen and comedians, and of course for farmers, lifeboat crews and those who plan the order of play at Wimbledon, it is. But such people also live by a mantra that runs deeper than any forecast, and comes from Siberia. There is no such thing as bad weather, only bad clothing.