A LOT OF HOT AIR
I was listening to the weather forecast on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme one morning when the expression ‘rattle the windows’ stopped me short. Seconds later I heard ‘wet and windy fare’. And, before the broadcast was over, the announcer had come up with: ‘How do I break this to you gently?’
The three minutes to eight slot now sees me nervously awaiting yet more ridiculous expressions masquerading as accessible language. In the all-singing, all-dancing BBC lurch towards universal accessibility, straightforward predictions about whether it’s going to be sunny or rainy are a thing of the past.
Within days of hearing that tsunami of nonsense, I’d added more to my list of overblown (I told you it was windy), supposed informality: ‘plume of cloud’, ‘get out and about after tea’, and even this one: ’13 to 14 degrees? No way, Jose! More like three or four’.
The culprit, more often than not, was weatherman Phil Avery. I know just what you’re trying to do, Avery, but you’ve got it wrong. Your evangelical drive towards colloquialism has nothing to do with trying to make the weather more intelligible. I suspect it has everything to do with you, as a fact-filled meteorologist, using the airwaves to self-indulgently bend our ears with your own brand of repressed lyricism. How dare you foist this obfuscating drivel – or should that be drizzle? – on us!
Then I heard younger forecasters tarting up the fact that there were going to be intermittent spells of wet weather with turns of phrase such as ‘pulses of rain’ and ‘showery regime’. And, worst of all, my temperature positively soared, threatening to reach the highest reading since records began, when the forecaster slipped in unnecessary, oleaginous, get-down-with-the-people snippets such as ‘that’s the scene for someone on the school run’.
It was at this juncture that I began to suspect that deep in the bowels of the Met Office, the authorities hold seminars on how to soften the impact of unpleasant weather predictions by aping the style of the proverbial, mealy-mouthed vicar – a kind of curate-climatologist.
Nor is this phenomenon just an occasional intrusion. It is incessant. I’ve also heard: ‘The wee small hours of Monday’, ‘Lovely day – wish I’d seen some of it’, and ‘Let me get you out of the door first’. This is more than a case of popularising the science of weather forecasting. This is nanny state encroachment. This weather-lite school of approachability clearly feels the need to take us by the hand and lead us gently down the path towards some kind of comfortable, warm front of comprehension.
Leave us alone! We’re British and we’re used to hearing about nasty weather. And we’re quite capable of putting up with a bitter wind thank you very much rather than be told that ‘cold air will slump down and whistle through the rigs on Friday’ or that ‘five to eight should just about cover it’. Put your woke, snowflake language on that slush pile of soggy faux-creativity and tell us what the weather is going to do.