TELEVISION: Drizzle

On TV, everybody talks about the weather, and everybody tries to do something different about it. Television weather shows range from Milwaukee’s Bill Carlsen squirting up a shaving-cream snowstorm to Manhattan’s arch, smock-coated Tex Antoine drooping a cartoon mustache to pass the same word about rain. There have been politicians (Maryland’s Senator John Marshall Butler once sponsored a nightly weather roundup as a campaign gimmick), puppets, and above all, dolls. As one of the largest sponsors of TV weather programs (36 on local stations in the East), the Atlantic Refining Co. has tried its share of stunts. But last week it took its weathermen on a junket to Florida, treated them to a lecture from weather bureau experts, gave them some charts and textbooks for homework, and ordered them, from now on, to tell their story straight.

No more, for Atlantic, the “poetic license” that has given the weather bureau fits for years; not even any female forecasters. “Atlantic is in the service business, and in our service stations the customers deal with men,” said Ad Director Dick Borden. “Naturally,” he argued, in a massive non sequitur, “they would prefer to see men weathercasters on television.” So Atlantic proposes to plug a new style: accurate, unadorned reporting. From now on, the company’s meteorological M.C.s will show fog on their charts as = , drizzle will be , rain ∙, snow ∙, showers ∇, hail ∆, lightning ∠, thunderstorms β, hurricanes ∮. Using such symbols, weather prophets may or may not convince the public that they really know the difference between a snowstorm, say, and a Scotch mist. But it is doubtful that they will ever adequately replace NBC-TV’s Tedi Thurman, who once announced: “The temperature in New York is 46, and me, I’m 36-26-36.”