Come rain or shine, they remain some of the most popular faces on our television screens standing beside a map of our neck of the woods…they are the weather forecasters.
The men and women who tell us whether we will need to wrap-up warm or slip on those shorts are friendly folk with great personalities.
Now they are accompanied by wonderful photographs sent in by viewers. Walking Tractor springs to mind.
At BBC Look East we have Julie (Treasure Quest) Reinger and Alex Dolan while down the road at Anglia there is Aisling Creevey and Chris “hello, there” Page plus members of the team at Weatherquest at the UEA.
And we mustn’t forget our very own Becky Mantin who often presents the weather for the country on ITV. The former Norwich School student began her career here at the EDP as a features assistant before making a name for herself at Anglia TV.
”The skill of being a national weather presenter is trying to deliver a big story for probably 48 hours over a very short space of time – one minute 50 (seconds) to get in all that information and try to leave your viewer really having an understanding of what’s happening now and what is going to be happening,” she said.
“When I used to do Anglia, you get to know your own region, so the towns and villages around The Wash, for example, will behave very differently when a system comes across than if you are on the top of a hill somewhere” she said.
“It’s a very localised weather. That’s the skill of being a regional weather presenter,” added Becky, who grew up in Saxlingham Nethergate.
Looking back over the years we have grown up watching some memorable forecasters such as the BBC’s Graham Parker, a wonderful and charming gentleman who died on Christmas Eve at the age of 90.
And then there was a man who, 40 years ago, was voted by readers of the magazine Titbits, as one of Britain’s top regional forecasters.
His name? Michael Hunt of course.
Viewers across Norfolk and Suffolk in the 1960s, 70s and into the 80s , loved to tune in watch Michael telling them what the weather was going to be like.
And who else would have said: “Well, I’m afraid yesterday’s forecast was a load of codswallop.”
Anglia was the first regional ITV company to establish its own weather department 1961 and Thomas Leonard Michael Hunt, born in Ebbw Vale in 1920, was appointed the station meteorologist.
The former RAF man had previously travelled the world as a meteorologist including spells at RAF Marham and Horsham St Faith.
Within a short time at Anglia this dapper gentleman with his trademark moustache became well known and much-loved across the whole region, developing a network of almost 100 local weather correspondents.
There was the time he announced it had been raining, not cats and dogs, but frogs. A mini tornado over the Fens had sucked up the amphibians and deposited them on houses.
Michael, who went on to host his own afternoon programme on Anglia when he spoke about most things – apart from the weather.
He inspired our own Jim Bacon, a Feltwell boy who went to Thetford Grammar School, to take up weather forecasting and he also became a popular broadcaster…and then the was David Brooks and many more.
As the Daily Mirror reported in in 1968. “The weather’s always sunny in East Anglia,”…thanks to Michael.
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