Gog.org.nz

There is an excluded front that has long sought to have the weather forecast put at the beginning of the televised news, instead of at the very end. At the moment, the weather is utterly miserable – so there could be no better time for GoG to revive the topic and take a stand. It has always seemed illogical to delay warnings of bad times, while irritating the viewers with a series of vague hints about forthcoming blizzards, floods or tempests. The weather is a matter of vital importance to people who live on the ground, but of no apparent significance to those who exist only on air. The indoor, urban dwellers who run our television channels regard the climate as mere light entertainment, and seem to have taken their cues for the forecast – as well as almost everything else on view – from their advertisers. They tempt us, they tease us and when all is exposed to the public’s icy glare, more often than not it turns out to be a damp squib. Or a surprisingly fine day.

Before the nightly weather forecast, and no matter on which channel, we are compelled to watch far too much crass advertising, baffling sport items mostly involving Australia (a country about which we are otherwise told nothing, but which tends to unfairly win sporting events because they practice and have more money than us) and dumb stories involving animals.

And then OneNews presents its forecast the wrong way round (Invercargill to Auckland), via a bloke who appears to live in a hedge and is rarely screened in his best gardening gear. Sunny Jim pops up frequently during the news, dropping lots of useless hints about when to put the kettle on and when not do the gardening or carry an umbrella, leaving most of us none the wiser about our next precarious 24 hours on this earthquake- and tsunami-prone place. Until 6.55 pm, when the blasted Chinese kettle that he advised us to put on catches fire and we miss his full weather-bomb warning while battling the ensuing kitchen inferno. There is only one thing worse than Hickey’s dress sense, and that’s the loud striped suits worn by newscasters who haven’t cottoned on to the fact that their televised image induces in the viewer a car-sickness-like vertigo that can easily result in spag bol all over the living room carpet.

Other nations have Drug Czars and other grandly titled supremos, but we are the only country to have a Weather Ambassador.

This cheery chap turns up every Friday afternoon on Radio New Zealand National (which, in a correctly inverted world, should be called New Zealand National Radio). Bob routinely advises everyone to stay indoors throughout the entire weekend, but this non-diplomatic Weather Ambassador sometimes also warns foreigners to keep away from New Zealand and its life-threatening climate. He has also produced a new Cloud poster, featuring a new cloud with a new name for which Bob and his team are seeking a worldwide patent. But what we really need during dark times such as these, Bob, is a 100 percent Pure NZ sky-blue Cloudless poster.

Over on TV 3, the weekday weather forecasts are always fine and bright. They star such an attractive presenter that you really don’t give two tosses how tomorrow will turn out, because she’s just so drop-dead lovely and startlingly well-dressed. A shallow depression then arrives, nudging away Toni’s warm front, and he has been known to persist throughout the weekend – when, coincidentally, it usually buckets down. Roll on Monday night…

According to unreliable sources, in Europe, they were planning a new forecasting system. This is how it would work:

In deference to the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Royal Commission for Political Correctness, the UK climate would no longer be referred to as “English Weather.” Rather than offend a large portion of the newly arrived population, it would be referred to as “Muslim Weather.”

In other words – “Partly Sunni, but mostly Shi’ite.”

The idea came to nothing. The forecast was politically incorrect.

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