Meet the nation’s favourite forecaster
How did Tomasz Schafernaker come back from ‘Nowheresville’ to become Britain’s best-loved weatherman? Judith Woods finds out
Afew hours before I’m due to meet Britain’s favourite weatherman, Tomasz Schafernaker, he’s only gone and put his foot in it – again. It’s not as bad as the time he calling the Western Isles “Nowheresville”, or threw up during the Radio 4 shipping forecast, or was caught on camera larkily flipping the proverbial bird at his colleagues and then gasping in comical horror when he realised he was live on air.
No, on this occasion he just muddled up his seasons. Summer with winter. No biggie. It’s the sort of thing that could happen to any highly trained meteorologist. I expect.
“It was just a slip of the tongue,” says Schafernaker breezily. “In the northern hemisphere June 1 is the first day of the meteorological summer. But in the southern hemisphere it’s the first day of the meteorological winter; my opening line was: ‘It’s the first day of winter’. I think everyone understood it was just a momentary lapse.”
Twitter went crazy of course, but then it always does; when he wears a particularly natty tie or makes one of his quips or reveals his impressive six-pack in a magazine.
It’s all terribly modern. Not at all what we’ve grown to expect from weather forecasters – but it doesn’t really matter because we love it, and him, to the moon and back.
By way of proof, Polish-british Schafernaker last week beat off all competition to take the title The Nation’s Favourite Weather Forecaster, proving that the British public always has a soft spot for a cheeky charmer.
Especially if he’s a dapper dresser (at 100-plus ties, he has more than David Dimbleby) who is easy on the eye and on the ear. So what if he once referred to the “muddy shite” of Glastonbury instead of “muddy site”.
We all knew what he meant, didn’t we? The fact Schakernaker then got a fit of the giggles would have raised the spirits of the soggiest festival-goer.
As far as the “Nowheresville” remark goes, he insists he was actually pointing to a Scottish snow-peaked mountain on his green screen, but seen from the sofa it seemed as though he was referring to the Outer Hebrides and Western Isles.
“I would never make rude remarks about anywhere in Britain,” says Schafernaker, turning terribly serious for a moment. “I have a relaxed manner but I also want to convey a certain gravitas, because weather forecasting is a hugely important job.”
In person he is handsome, compact and, even at 38, looks impossibly young. You know those 12-year-old policemen? Schafernaker could be their little brother.
“If you think I look young now, you should have seen me when I started out,” he grins. “There I was, aged 22, turning up at 3.30am to various regional BBC studios, unlocking the doors, switching on the lights and getting started with my weather graphics while I waited for the newsreader to arrive.
“I’ve seen footage of me from those days and I really do look like a schoolboy, jumping about a lot on camera.”
Schafernaker, who is single and lives alone in west London, has learned to stand still but nevertheless zings with energy, which he channels in the gym. In fact, he generated quite a warm front when he showed off his honed physique in the gay magazine Attitude, a notable first for the weather forecast fraternity.
“A lot of my fans are on social media and I get all sorts of emails; Carol [Kirkwood] gets piles of letters every week. I tend to get random invitations to strangers’ weddings, poems or Easter cards at Christmas,” he says.
“You can do an important job without being po-faced and unapproachable; times change and styles change but people want facts about the weather.”
Born in Gdansk, the son of an international business consultant, who was himself raised in the UK, Schafernaker was brought up in London and Poland and is bilingual; he prefers to keep diplomatically schtum on the topic of Brexit. He took his GCSES and A-levels here, then studied meteorology at the University of Reading.
“I just felt the pull of the weather,” he says. “I had always found it fascinating. I didn’t intend to be a forecaster, I just sort of fell into it by chance.”
His favourite clouds are Altocumulus lenticularis, those stationary ones that look like flying saucers, especially if they are bathed in morning or evening light. But before he chose a career in cloud formations and precipitation, the young Schafernaker dabbled with the idea of studying architecture.
“In most respects, I’m far more of an artsy, creative person than a typical clichéd scientist type,” he says. “I paint, I draw, I do graphic art. But I think it’s good for those two worlds to overlap because they do in real life.”
It would be a mistake to underestimate Schafernaker’s academic credentials; he may wear his expertise lightly, but meteorology is essentially the study of atmospheric physics and a discipline that involves a great deal of applied maths.
After graduation, Schafernaker went travelling in southeast Asia. In his absence his aunt noticed a job advert for a broadcast assistant in the BBC weather department and applied on his behalf. He aced the interview and got the job. Within a year he had made it on screen.
“I think I was mature for my years,” he says. “I had grown up between two countries so I was quite independent and accustomed to dealing with new situations and new people.”
He underwent further extensive training at the Met Office college in Exeter, and was then based at RAF Lyneham in Wiltshire.
“Part of my role there was to brief pilots from all over the world, who would come into the forecast to look at the weather maps I had produced, and I would advise them on flying conditions and turbulence,” says Schafernaker.
“I remember at the very beginning being a bit nervous because they were all about 45 and I was only 24, but my manager told me: ‘You know your science, you know your stuff; there’s really no need to worry.’”
He returned to television in 2006 and by the age of 26 was appearing nationwide.
“Standing in front of the cameras and blabbing has never been a problem from day one,” he says. “As far as the green screen goes, it may be blank in the studio but somehow instinctively you know that if you stretch your arm so far down you will be by Plymouth and so far up you will be near Aberdeen.”
Or indeed, Nowheresville. Now that episode has been clarified, it might be time to talk about the finger thing – “a mistake, let’s move on” – and the “partied so hard at the BBC Christmas bash he threw up over Forth, Tyne and Dogger” thing.
“I really do want to set the record straight in that regard,” he says. “Firstly there was no BBC party; secondly I was standing in for a colleague who was taken ill with a stomach bug. I ran to the studio, read the entire forecast and was then promptly ill with the same bug. There was no big drama.”
Perhaps not for Schafernaker, but it all adds to the gaiety of the nation. Although as far as predicting a BBQ summer goes, he refuses even to use the phrase. “British summers are unpredictable,” he says flatly. “I can look at the sky and tell you what the weather will be like in a few hours or maybe overnight but not far into the future.”
As for Schafernaker’s future, he is, thank heavens, not going anywhere apart from back into the studio. But he does have a side project in the offing; a children’s book about the solar system.
“I’m writing the text and doing the graphics,” he says. “It will be interesting to see where it takes me.”
As we’ve already taken him to our hearts, I imagine the sky’s very much the limit.