If only we had British weather
Declan Lynch T
HERE was a time when most things in Britain were obviously better than the equivalent things in Ireland. If you went to London for a few days, on your re-entry you would realise straight away that in London they had much better cars, for example, much better transport of all kinds. And the roads would be better.
And there would be better radios in the cars. And the music on the radios would be better. And that was just the cars.
We do not accept these disparities any more. We have seen too much, we know too much. Television has equalised a lot of these things. We are all looking at the same football matches, in the same way. So why do they still have much better weather than we do? What is that all about?
I mean the TV weather of course, and I don’t mean their presenters are better than the presenters of the weather on RTE, because our ones are excellent and some of them are cult figures — which is taking it about as far as you can go, in the weather presenting game.
No, I am talking about the tools at their disposal, which look so plain, so disappointingly ordinary next to the beautiful machinery which is on display during the BBC presentations.
Though it is of no practical value to most Irish people, you could actually watch the Weather on the BBC just for the aesthetic pleasure of it, the way the camera moves across this superb map of the United Kingdom, dwelling in detail on the various regions — you can see with wondrous clarity that there’ ll be a heavy shower on the outskirts of Birmingham at about 3.30 in the afternoon, followed by a spell of bright sunshine which itself brings an added loveliness to the colouring of the map.
Indeed it may be of some practical value after all, if you can ignore the commentary and just keep an eye on the map when Ireland comes into the frame, because they tend to show a bit of our weather too.
We can feed off the stuff that they are throwing away, hoping that the presenter isn’t standing in front of our part of the world, that we can take advantage of their largesse.
It brings us back to that uncomfortable feeling from days of yore, that if we weren’t situated close enough to Britain to “absorb” the best of their culture, we would be sunk.
And the Weather is more than a cultural matter to us, it is a vital national interest. Yet we are in awe of the advanced technologies of the BBC, which may not even be all that advanced, just significantly more advanced than the relatively primitive pictures we are seeing on RTE1.
Why are such luxuries denied to Evelyn Cusack and Jean Byrne? Why is it all so generalised, with talk of rain in “the south-east”, when on the BBC you can see that rain sweeping through your area, through your town, at the appointed hour?
Indeed such is the confidence which you draw from their lavish weather presentation, you tend to regard the BBC TV forecast as the true representation of the intentions of the gods — and if it turns out “wrong”, it is in fact the weather itself which is wrong.
And no doubt at a subconscious level the relatively inferior images on RTE are feeding the discontent of the people on other aspects of our weather — it seems that one of the greatest causes of private grief in this country, is the fact that before they tell us what the weather will be like, they tell us what the weather was like, earlier in the day.
I know that William Faulkner said that “the past is never dead, it’s not even past”. But unless we have disastrous weather events of the type which happened last week, when it comes to the weather the past really is dead, and we are right to bury it.
Then again they rattle through a quick reprise of the day’s weather highlights on BBC too, but such is the extravagance of the enterprise all round, nobody minds.
Over there, more is always better.