For years, I have been highly dismissive of the TV weather reports. They say it will rain but it doesn’t. They say the morning will bring showers but it turns out to be fine. They say snow to 200m for coastal Otago (motorway to close?) but we awake to blue skies. In short, they usually seem to get the forecast wrong.
I am also irritated by the way the weatherman gets to introduce the 6 o’clock news, then gets teasing opportunities for self-promotion throughout the news, and then closes the news as the triumphant grand finale. Everything else, from tragic wars in the Middle East to the disturbing political scene in the US, seems to pale into insignificance beside the weather forecast.
For me, Dan’s quirky personality and his excessively eloquent style remain questionable, as does Renee’s dodgy dress sense. And they both share that stupid habit of describing the weather before saying the place name (eg "showers and light winds for ...Hamilton") As a result of this, everyone has to absorb and then delete information that is irrelevant to their location (unless they live in Hamilton, of course).
Dunedin always seems to show a relatively gloomy forecast. But as we know, the 3pm temperature is a very poor and prejudiced measure to describe the overall quality of a day’s weather. It certainly doesn’t take into account gale force winds in Wellington or squally, humid showers in Auckland, does it?
But perhaps the worst thing about the weather forecast slot is the sheer weight of information that is thrown at us. Dan’s machine-gun style of chatter runs at more than 180 words per minute, while the screen simultaneously bombards us with a tsunami of impossibly busy graphics. Highs, overnight lows, sun symbols, cloud symbols and occasional flashing lightning forks pop up all over the screen.
Meanwhile, wiggly lines crawl like drunken worms around the isobars and fronts. We see the detailed projections for up to 25 places simultaneously. And all the while, down in the bottom left-hand corner, the time of day for tomorrow remorselessly ticks on in three-hour segments, just out of conscious awareness. It’s impossible to take it all in.
We are then shown crazy aerial shots of New Zealand, seemingly taken from a stricken spaceship plummeting earthwards as it swoops up from the South.
The overall effect is simply to offer bizarre and confusing distortions of otherwise well-known and familiar landmarks. It all comes to a thankful conclusion when we are finally shown a picture of a newborn lamb in Cromwell or a lovely sunset over Wellington harbour.
These images seem to be thrown in randomly at the end, simply because they’re nice. The presenter then turns to the camera, smiles and takes a barely perceptible bow. Phew, performance over!
Essentially, I desperately want to see a reduction in the volume of information that is thrown frenetically at us each night. Instead of the scattergun spray of words, symbols and pictures that currently assaults our senses, how about using a different, more artistic style of presentation that soothes and relaxes the viewer instead? An alternative forecast could simply be based on a gentle, evenly paced time lapse sequence of satellite images taken over the past 24 hours.
Magical swirls of cloud would drift slowly across the ocean towards our shores, accompanied by a peaceful classical soundtrack. We could gaze contentedly at the wonderful flow of natural imagery that unfolds, easy to see and easy to understand.
The sequence would then flow smoothly forward into the following day, using "best guess" projections as to how these graceful systems might develop from here. We could all then work out for ourselves what was likely to happen at our place next.
The weather segment would fade slowly in, and would then fade slowly out. Nightfall would be shown using shades of grey imagery, and dawn would break out into glorious colour again. There would be no words, no numbers, and no facts — in fact, no presenters!
Instead, we would experience two or three minutes of silent reverie and quiet contemplation of the natural marvel that is our weather when viewed from on high. It would provide a daily opportunity for us all to pause and appreciate what a beautiful planet we inhabit, and to ponder our own little place in the bigger picture.
And that would be enough for me.
- Chris Skellett is an author, speaker and workshop presenter who lives in Warrington.
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Comments
Curmudgeonly. I say that because no format seems to please viewers (or radio listeners). If they paid for the services, crit would be justified. But they don't, and think they 'own' people beamed into their living rooms.
'Don't need a Weatherman..' is from 'Subterranean Homesick Blues', by Bob Dylan, ref to The Weathermen, an underground radical group of destructive tendency.