Do our television weathermen appear to you a little more camp than they used to be? There’s a certain lascivious flourish of the hand when they herald an area of low pressure over Daventry, and a voice which is just that little bit overfamiliar, laced with a flamboyance that, I’m sure, never used to be present. Especially Tomasz Schafernaker — which, when you think about it, is an incredibly camp name.

Tomasz tells us about the awful storms and high winds approaching from the Baltic and I could swear he’s about to pirouette and break into I Will Survive. I never thought that with Bill Giles or John Kettley, still less Michael Fish.

Michael had a knowing weariness to his voice that made you wonder sometimes if after his shift at Television Centre he went shoplifting in Sainsbury’s for dark, compulsive, psychological reasons — but camp, never. I don’t mind — nothing against it.

Perhaps it’s just one of those jobs that have been colonised by very camp young men recently, like flight attending and policing. Or maybe it’s a defence mechanism, given that nobody these days trusts weathermen and we assume they are just there to entertain, basically like that horoscope chappie Russell Grant, only with a map.

Poor old Fishy was wheeled out again last week, the ghosts of unseen hurricanes whipping around his head, knocking down trees and destroying roofs. The Met Office had decided that its earlier prediction — made aeons ago in April — that August was going to be an absolute scorcher might have been a few nanometers wide of the mark. Instead, it said: we’ve done a few more tests and we think you should put in for a supply of gopher wood.

Fish was indignant that anyone should castigate the Met Office for its earlier call — it was all the media’s fault, he insisted.

The weather centre had merely said that there was a 65% chance of August being sunny and the press had gone overboard — phew wot a scorcher, millions to die of skin cancer, dogs roasting in locked cars etc.

Well, maybe. But if you’d asked me in January what the weather was going to be like in August, I would have said, oh, I reckon it’ll probably be sunny, you know? You want me to put a figure on it? Okay, 60, 65% chance it’ll be nice and sunny. It might rain a bit, though.

No balloons, no satellites, no intimation of scientific brilliance. Just a guess. Same as it is every year: hot bits here and there (the hottest since records began!) followed by damp bits (the wettest August on record!) and then a clear warmish spell leading into September (our Indian summer is harbinger of global warming, say experts!). Same every year.

Needless to say, as soon as the Met Office had issued its revised forecast and Fishy had been put back in his disgruntled weatherman box with his jumper, the clouds scurried from the sky as if chased by panthers, the sun came out and dogs started to roast in cars.

“It’s going to be sunny all day!” my local TV weatherman yelped at me on Friday, before singing Follow the Yellow Brick Road and pouting at a depression heading west from Ukraine.

Listen: the Met Office is okay, although by no means brilliant, at giving you the weather forecast for the next five or six hours. It can do this marginally better than you or I would manage simply by looking out of the window and sniffing the wind. Over a time period of a month or more it has a strike rate of correct predictions that could be achieved by throwing a coin up in the air.

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