Ian McCaskill

Ian McCaskill (born John Robertson McCaskill; 28 July 1938 – 10 December 2016) was a Scottish meteorologist and television and radio presenter, who frequently presented weather forecasts on the BBC. Born in Glasgow and an alumni of the University of Glasgow, he began working for the Met Office in 1961, producing long range forecasts for aircraft. McCaskill began appearing on BBC Television and Radio in 1978, presenting weather bulletins until his retirement from the Met Office in 1998. He was a fellow of the Royal Meteorological Society and the vice-president of the Epilepsy Society.

Early life McCaskill was born John Robertson McCaskill in Glasgow on 28 July 1938. He was the son of an insurance agent, and was brought up in a tenement block near Queen's Park, in the south part of Glasgow. McCaskill attended Queen's Park Secondary in Glasgow, and then the University of Glasgow, where he read geology and chemistry in his bid to go into teaching, after giving up his ambition to become a doctor because the university required an undergraduate degree before enrolling at the University of Glasgow School of Medicine, Dentistry & Nursing.

During the late 1970s, McCaskill answered a memo from the BBC that opened entries for Met Office staff to volunteer to join its presenting team for news broadcasts. He frequently presented the forecasts without shoes on so he could avoid generating static electricity. In 1987, McCaskill supplied his colleague Michael Fish the inaccurate forecast in which Fish told the nation that no hurricane was due the evening before the Great storm of 1987, Compelled to by Civil Service rules, including by the satirical comedy show Spitting Image and by impersonator Rory Bremner, In 1998, McCaskill helped the Post Office launch a range of six new insurance policies, and appeared in a comedic television advertisement for BT pay phones set in Brighton. He read the weather in a guest role for two weeks on the ITV breakfast franchise GMTV in lieu of Simon Keeling in mid-1999, and in the same year, presented the BBC Two series The Essential Guide to the Weather.

McCaskill worked as a motivational speaker, and was also a guest on various other programmes. McCaskill was a panellist on Have I Got News for You in October 1998, as well as in a number of television advertisements and in pantomime, He also participated in the first series of Celebrity Fit Club in 2002 and was a contestant on Celebrity MasterChef in 2006. Other programmes he appeared on included Tomorrow's World, Children in Need, Crackerjack!, Blankety Blank, Celebrity Ready Steady Cook and So Graham Norton. McCaskill was a fellow of the Royal Meteorological Society and the vice-president of the Epilepsy Society.

Personal life and death McCaskill lived at Seer Green, near Beaconsfield in Buckinghamshire. He had two daughters with his first wife Lesley Charlesworth, a primary teacher, to whom he was married from 1959 until her death from breast cancer in 1992.

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