ON the 50th anniversary of television weather forecasting, and echoing Samuel Johnson's belief that when two Englishmen meet the weather will be conversation's first topic, we have been down south somewhere for a chinwag with Jack Scott.

Once among television's friendliest and most familiar figures, a cheery soul for whom any cloud might have a silver lining, he is 80, still plays golf two or three times a week, enjoyed a BBC reunion last weekend.

He is affable, agreeable, urbane, polite, proper and perfectly groomed. He saved for a rainy day, as weather men doubtless should, has lived these past two years in a handsome modern town house in Wallingford, south Oxfordshire.

For all that, the outlook remains oddly uncertain. His wife died three years ago; what he most wanted to talk about was Co Durham - hearth, home, hedgeback - and how very much he misses it.

"I talk to the lady who lives over the road and I might say how-do to the chap out the back but apart from that I don't know anyone else here at all.

"That's what strikes me as the big difference between here and up north, where I come from simply everyone knew everyone else. If you stopped to talk to someone in the street down here, they'd think there was something wrong with you."

He is much too nice a man, and for Jack Scott "nice" is the only word, to suggest that it makes southerners any worse. It simply makes them different. "You get used to living like this, I don't hold it against anyone," he says. "I'm sure they're very nice people, but apart from the golf I live very quietly now."

A miner's son, he grew up in East Howle, a long disappeared pit village near Ferryhill, and became one of just two village children - "the other was the shopkeeper's son" - to qualify for Spennymoor Grammar School.

"My parents were very proud but a bit bothered, too," he recalls. "They didn't want the neighbours to suppose that they were better than anyone else, that suddenly they'd become posh."

East Howle was a couple of long rows of colliery terraces, friendships forged on well scrubbed doorsteps, netties and mettles out the back, football on the former pit site they knew simply as The Black.

"In those days the weather just came and went," says Jack. "The only interest I had in it was whether it would stop us playing football on The Black."

Grammar School gave him a chance for which he remains deeply grateful - "I often think about it; everyone else went down the pit at 14" - but at 16 he was at Thrislington Colliery anyway, keeping his head above water in the offices.

His parents wanted him to continue for A levels, or whatever then they were called. Jack - Jackie, the family called him - just wanted to earn his keep.

Then came the radio programme which changed his life and climes for ever.

"I remember it like it was yesterday. I was 17, just getting ready for a dance one Saturday night, when at the end of the news they announced that they were looking for grammar school boys to become trainee weather forecasters."

He applied, got an interview in Darlington - "even that seemed a long way away" - and, accepted, was sent to training college in Gloucester. "Well," he says, "you can imagine..."

A newly qualified meteorological assistant, he worked at the wartime Thornaby airfield - in uniform, alongside the RAF - sent out every hour to see what the weather was doing, to record statistics fair and foul and to send them via teleprinter to headquarters.

By the end of hostilities he was a senior met assistant, had met his wife Marion while at Thornaby and several years later became a fully fledged forecaster, prescient and correct.

"It was the dream," he says, though it wasn't until 1968 that his boss suggested he apply for a television weatherman's job. Had Scott of the Antarctic blown in, he could hardly have made a greater impression than Scott of East Howle.

High pressure? "I loved every minute. The BBC man who took me through it told me to forget I was talking to millions of people and believe I was talking to one. That was the secret. If I was talking about the North-East weather, I'd be talking to my mum.

"It was the best move I ever made, not because I was on the telly but because I was forecasting for millions and not just a few pilots, or something."

Back home in Ferryhill, ran the affectionate joke, his mum would wear her fur coat every time he appeared with his Met Office swagger stick - though no man has less side - and his eclectic assortment of isobars.

"Well, she was very proud," he says, "but she thought all mothers were proud of their sons. It was nothing to do with me being on telly two or three times a week."

When he retired at 60, the Met Office's senior forecaster, Thames Television sought his sunny smile and, in those parts at any rate, his profile reached still further for the sky.

There were charity golf days, personal appearances, after dinner speaking - "I have to say it paid very well". There were altogether more congenial hours and people, lots of people, stopping him in the street.

"Weather forecasters always had their legs pulled, but no one got really cross. We had one or two angry letters, but once we'd explained, it always seemed to be accepted. I used not to understand it, what persuaded folk to write letters to people they'd seen on telly, but since I retired I understand absolutely. There are people I feel like writing to myself."

For 40 years, he and Marion lived in Iver, Buckinghamshire. When she died, he moved to Wallingford - a Saxon town best remembered as the home of Agatha Christie - to be nearer his son.

It should again be stressed, therefore, that he has nothing against Wallingford, or its folk, or probably anyone on earth.

The bus driver from Oxford was fine, the woman in the tourist information was fine, if mistaken, the barmaid in the Dolphin was fine, the Morland's bitter better yet.

Even the weather was kind, an invigorating winter's day, and the forecast had been spot on.

It's just not East Howle, that's all.

He lives on the outskirts, back garden but no netty, green but no Black. The staircase is hung with meteorological cartoons including an original by Jak, something about earthquakes, given by the BBC when he retired.

Family memories abound; his other son - they were David and Jonathan - was lost in a climbing accident in India.

Though Wallingford is Thames Television heartland, no one's ever recognised him, or if they have never admitted to it. He supposes it a good thing.

"I wondered if they might have done, but it's just never happened. I wouldn't want to be seen as above anyone, because I'm not. I'm very glad you're The Northern Echo and not the Oxford Mail."

The reunion had been convivial, the BBC boat pushed out. Though Bert Foord is long dead - "very nice man Bert, though not a very good golfer" - his regular golf partner George Cowling, who presented the first television forecast in January 1954, was among those looking back at 50 years of forecasts.

For various reasons, Barbara Edwards, Graham Parker and Bob Giles were unable to attend.

Not given to seaweed and such stuff, he still relies on the Met Office, and the BBC, for his weather information. "It was a pretty good science when I was there but recent developments have made it even better.

"The person telling you several times a day what it's going to be like has a whole band of scientists behind him. You have to accept that occasionally they'll get it wrong but I trust the blokes; you'd be daft not to."

The conversation lasts around two hours, set fair for very much longer but for the need to retrace the route back north.

"I still wish I was coming with you," said the delightful Mr Scott, and on the walk back into Wallingford, a small depression developed.