In her office lined with maps of France and the world, in the TF1 tower, in Boulogne-Billancourt, Evelyne Dhéliat, thirty years of presenting the weather on the channel, has a few files at hand. “Look, that’s impressive! Saturday 1er January 2022, already the first batch of records: 16.8°C in Deauville [Calvados], 19.6°C in Aurillac, [dans le Cantal] », she laments as she reads an information bulletin from Météo France indicating unprecedented temperatures in nineteen cities, including Limoges, Biarritz (Pyrénées-Atlantiques), Bordeaux, Caen, and ending with a worrying ” etc. etc etc ».
New bulletin, July 3: “The April-May-June quarter was the hottest on average observed in France since 1900.” The head of the weather service blows: “It’s just this, this, this…” She also cites from memory other outstanding examples of recent years. “Soon it will be easy to remember temperature records. It will be those of the week before, if not the day before”, she half kidding.
This summer, Evelyne Dhéliat presented a weather report that sometimes looks apocalyptic. In June, she had announced the extreme heat waves. Added to this were the fires devastating the Gironde, a drought leading to water cuts in certain regions and storms causing the death of five people in Corsica. In the media, these meteorological episodes have relegated the Covid-19 epidemic or the war in Ukraine to second place.
The profession has changed
More than ever, the suffocating summer of 2022 will have highlighted the weather presenters. Those who, for a long time, were the elegant women or the ideal sons-in-law that viewers watched to find out if a light sweater would be enough the next day. The same ones who have been introducing and concluding the “8 p.m.” mass for decades – since 1958, when the weather report became daily on French television.
“To say flatly ‘France will be affected by a new heat wave in the coming days’, I don’t think that works anymore. People have to understand that clearly, this week, France is going to burn. » Marc Hay, presenter at BFM-TV
The same ones that evoke the “anticyclones” and the “fall in precipitation” without being scientific. Unlike the Anglo-Saxons, most of them have been journalists since the 1970s, sometimes trained in just a few days. Members of the editorial staff almost like the others who, today, talk about global warming almost every day. An upheaval for all.
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