Under the weather

“No I don’t,” says Britain’s best known meteorologist.

“I never tire of researching the weather or presenting the weather, but I do get tired of being blamed for it.”

We meet Michael Fish last Thursday at Reeth, where he is to give a generally overcast talk on global warming, part of the Swaledale Festival.

It is doubtless ironic, and something for which the poor chap should clearly not be held responsible, that it is the most miserable, misanthropic, mufflered May day imaginable. So what of the folklore about ne’er casting a clout till May is out?

“Rubbish, an old wives’ tale, they didn’t know anything. The Met Office has the biggest computer in the world,” he says, with a slight acerbity perhaps to be expected from someone whose listed hobbies include being a grumpy old man.

It’s May 29, and Reeth wraps up warm, nonetheless.

THEY call it the Reeth Lecture – a BBC man would approve – held at the village Methodist church and sold out weeks in advance. Last year they had Lady Lucinda Lambton talking lavatories.

That the column is allowed in, and prudently bags a seat next to the pipes, is because (as a Met man might suppose) we’d get where draughts couldn’t.

The speaker’s up on the train from London – “it was lovely and sunny this morning” – and the day previously had ended a holiday in Dubrovnik. “Lovely there, too. I nearly didn’t come home.”

It starts at 3pm, doors open 2.30, by which time around 30 people eagerly await outside.

Some carry cushions, others will be sold one for £3. “Church and chapel seats are not renowned for their comfort,” says the Festival programme.

Reeth’s may be regarded as a minor penance.

Julia Thorogood, right at the front, has particular reason to remember the day which helped Fish become what the Sunday Times called a “national treasure”.

It was October 15, 1987, the day of her hen party. After the Six O’Clock News that night, Fish told the nation that a lady had phoned the BBC because she’d heard a hurricane was in the offing. “If you’re watching, don’t worry, there isn’t,” he reassured.

That night Britain’s worst storm for 300 years hit South- East England. Eighteen died, 15 million trees were uprooted, massive damage caused by the tail end of Hurricane Katrina.

“I’d had such a good night I slept through it,” recalls Julia, who then lived in Middlesex.

“The next day was just unbelievable.

“I had to go to get my wedding dress and you couldn’t even see where the roads were meant to be for all the leaves and branches. It was surreal, like walking through Narnia or something.”

Fish claimed that he’d been talking about Florida, that he had indeed warned of strong winds and that in any case it was his colleague Bill Giles to blame. “Rotten devil went and picked up an OBE,” he jokes.

After the storm – though not, of course, because of it – he was appointed MBE, awarded two honorary doctorates, made a Freeman of the City of London, featured in a top ten record, was named Britain’s best dressed and worst dressed man in the same year, wrote a book, became famous for his ties and has recently earned enthusiastic reviews while touring with The Play What I Wrote, about Morecambe and Wise.

There are Michael Fish T-shirts, mugs and fridge magnets.

The “supreme accolade,” he supposes, was when the 1987 clip was shown at the opening ceremony of the 2012 Olympics.

As doubtless has been said before, it’s an ill wind that blows nobody any good.

He was born in Eastbourne, said to be England’s sunniest town, supposes that he wanted to be a weather man from being just six or seven years old.

The North Sea surge which in 1953 killed around 300 people on the East Anglian coast may have had something to do with it, he supposes.

He joined the Met Office in 1962, first broadcast nine years later, counted Ferryhill-born Jack Scott among his television colleagues.

Now 70, he still works part-time for regional television and other outlets.

Between 85 and 87 per cent of forecasts are accurate, he says – “of course those figures are provided by the Met Office themselves”.

His colleague Ian McCaskill supposed him the last of the true weather forecasters. “Michael interpreted the skies, Nowadays most of the decisions are made by the computer.”

His website affects deflection. “He will always be remembered for the misreported ‘hurricane’ forecast, but other highlights are wiping out thousands of pigeons and the wrong sort of snow.”

HE’S 70, looks older, ascends gingerly to the pulpit of the galleried chapel and finds himself standing directly above a tapestry proclaiming “Christ is risen, Alleluia.”

“I don’t do this sort of thing very often,” he says, and has given up completely on after dinner speaking. “A waste of space,” he’d suggested.

The first ten minutes are jocular, the next 40 so unequivocally occupied with prophecy of impending Armageddon that a Victorian hellfire hot gospeller might have been deemed lukewarm by comparison.

Pacific islands are disappearing, seas dying, contagion spreading, 80 per cent of the snow gone from Kilimanjaro, winters wetter, summers drier, the earth hurtling headlong towards being uninhabitable. Our grandchildren, he forecasts, may never see snow.

There are scriptural equivalents, of course – that and Joanne Southcott’s Sealed Box – but what with that and the Methodist church pew, it’s all a bit uncomfortable.

Remembering where he is, he merely observes that it’s been “hissing down”, though a reference to one of the more prodigious producers of methane gas –“cows fart like mad” – may not have chimed particularly well with John Wesley.

A lady in the gods – the weather gods, perhaps – asks if there are benefits from global warming, other than sun bathing. “You’d only get skin cancer,” he says.

Half way through it all, a 1960s song called Eve of Destruction limps anxiously to mind. The temptation is either to fall down before the altar and crave mercy or to nip across to the Buck and get bladdered.

Afterwards there’s tea and biscuits. Outside it’s still grey and chilly.

Perhaps preferring the old wives’ tale, Swaledale has another three days before even thinking of casting a clout.

“When two Englishmen meet,
their first talk is of the weather” –
Dr Samuel Johnson, The Idler, 1758