Blow hot, blow cold

Weather is a very personal thing. One person’s hot is another one’s cold. For example, you may not want to know about the velocity of the tornado moving towards Japan with minute details not only about its speed but also its angle and the possible damage it will cause. But Japanese farmers would be glued to their TV sets, taking notes.

Another thing: viewers form attachments to different weather presenters, whom they compulsively watch — sometimes even trust. Also, they look so knowledgeable. So you might have some difficulty believing that when a weather capsule is being shot, the presenters stand in front of a blank wall. When they intelligently point at regions of the world explaining weather cycles, they are actually pointing at nothing. What they do have is a TV monitor placed in front of them, which helps them get their directions right. You might have noticed that they avoid wearing the colour blue like it’s bad luck; that’s because the wall they stand before is flooded with blue light and a colour separation overlay. The blue will be replaced by a clean feed of charts from the Paintbox computer — in simpler terms, the maps and charts you see. If the presenter wore blue, you would see only maps and no presenter.

In the beginning, viewers could only turn to DD for the daily weather and temperature chart. Then there was BBC and CNN. Now there’s weather on all Indian news programmes, except Aaj Tak.

The only difference being the level of professionalism involved.

How accurate is TV weather? BBC employs meteorologists for the job. The BBC weather centre became fully operational in 1991 and employs trained meteorologists. This team of 13 weather men and women together produce 54 separate broadcasts each weekday and 57 each weekend. “The reports are produced in Bracknell in south-east England, nowhere near the BBC office. The weather presenters give the reports a style, an attitude. BBC presenters have no scripts and they speak impromptu, without the aid of an auto-cue. That is why they say strange things sometimes,” explains Richard Harris, of the BBC Delhi Bureau. Now you know why TV weather people tend to blow in a completely different direction from the wind and smile a lot.

On the other hand, the weather presenters of STAR News and Doordarshan News have a written script. They’re much more predictable and talk as if they are the best people to go to if you want to know where the next hurricane is coming from.

In fact, they don’t know that much about the weather. “None of our presenters are trained. But they do have a basic knowledge of the weather. Based on the reports we get, some from the Met department and others from a source,” explains NDTV’s General Manager Rao, somewhat obscurely. The other “source” NDTV cannot disclose, neither does Rao explain why he thinks it is unimportant for their weather girls to know about the weather. Or why weather girl, “thank you Anuradha” Srinivasan, keeps her head so still while giving you the temperature, you think she’s got a crick in her neck.

Meanwhile, Doordarshan has temporarily removed its weather presenters. “First we had Met department officials anchoring the weather. But it did not go down well with the viewers. They didn’t have the right voice and face to carry it off. Now we are training our own people to present the weather,” explains John Churchill, Head of news, DD-India.

While Aaj Tak has no weather update, Zee News leaves the weather report to the news anchor. No style, no attitude. Which takes all the fun out of temperatures rising or falling.