Weatherman Bill Giles: Forecaster of our changing times For a nation obsessed with weather, our forecasters are a barometer not just of the skies, but our times. They were sages, modern-day druids with sticks reading the signs on our behalf. The colourful jumpers, the eccentric ties and the occasional gaffes are now the stuff of weather legend. To step into Giles's comforting post-war bungalow, with its chiming electronic clock, is to step back into the world of 6.45pm during my childhood. I do not want to leave, so I promise to behave. For Giles, who was brought up in Dittisham, near Dartmouth, the story began at boarding school. In an attempt to escape Friday cross-country running, he joined the school geography club. They studied meteorology and he was immediately "hooked." "It was the clouds," says Giles. I still love clouds. We've got 250 types at the Met Office. You're always looking at something new. My favourite is the thunder cloud, and I adore thunderstorms. Although, one of the things I learnt very quickly, as a weatherman, is never to talk about thunder in a weather broadcast unless you're absolutely sure. I had one woman who used to phone up straight away to check, so she could go under the stairs with a bottle of gin. Another lady would go straight down to the London Underground and go round and round until she thought it was over. After joining the Meteorological Department in the Fifties, as one of the many young scientists who specialised in mathematics and physics, Giles found himself broadcasting radio weather forecasts. In 1974, he began his first television broadcasts. This was the era when they still used the Met's scientific symbols, including a triangle for fog and three horizontal lines for heavy rain, and weathermen were purely scientists. "We soon realised that it wasn't enough to send some bright spark from Cambridge across with a weather map, with a brilliant mind, but a speech impediment," says Giles. You had to have people who could communicate and explain the weather to people in a way they could understand. But it was a huge thing to change the approach. Gradually, they were auditioned as much for their presentation skills as their scientific credentials. Meanwhile, the old signs were replaced with ones that people understood. We also started talking about the effects of weather, including a sunburn index to warn people. Giles pauses briefly. Of course that was a disaster. We'd say it's going to be very high sunburn risk in Bournemouth and everyone would flock there for the weekend. Totally defeated the object. As Giles's career began to take off in the 1970s, he and the other burgeoning weather stars were paid £17 per broadcast in addition to their civil service salaries at the Met Office. When the number of broadcasts started to rise, Giles admits there was jealousy among some of his colleagues at HQ who were "not too keen" on younger forecasters making more money than them. But he is surprisingly noble on the subject of the great 1987 storm fiasco. He not only defends Michael Fish: he takes the bullet for him. "First, Michael can't be blamed for that because the French forecasters were on strike and we were missing crucial information from the Bay of Biscay," he says. Second, I was the one who got it wrong when I did 9.25pm and said it was a 'bit breezy up the Channel. Well, that was one hell of a breeze. It was the worst storm to hit the South East in nearly 300 years. There is just the faintest hint of Alan Partridge about Giles, who divorced his first wife, with whom he has a grown-up son and daughter, in 1991. He cannot stop himself referring to women as "ladies." He has clearly not come through the other side of the political correctness revolution. And he went "ballistic" when the media stated, wrongly, that there was going to be a "barbecue summer" a few years ago because "it put medium-term forecasting back 10 years." Of course, unlike Partridge, and in spite of the novelty umbrellas and jumpers, Giles is a clever man who reads the current climate in forecasting with sharp perception. Where once there were three weather broadcasts a day, there are now hundreds. In the meantime, advances in computing mean a much younger and less experienced generation of presenters has taken over. And the weather is now a commercial commodity, a multi-million pound industry in which no one gives the data away for free any more. This imposes a rigid structure on forecasts, says Giles. "The major problem is that you don't get more than a day ahead on the weather," he says. We used to tell the whole story, so on a Monday in early autumn if you thought the first frosts were coming on Thursday, that's what you'd start with. But our legacy still holds good. Across the world, meteorological centres are working alongside broadcasters to deliver the weather in a way that people can properly understand. That's what we did. We changed the weather forever and we're very proud of that. And even now a day rarely goes by without someone asking Giles to predict the weather. They ask him if it will be fine for their wedding, their barbecue, their bowls match. And if it is not, they still hold him responsible. "Don't blame me, I tell them," says Giles. Blame the vicar. And then I point up to the sky.