CHRIS TITLEY warms to Yorkshire's sunniest weather forecaster, a man who is as bright as his jackets.

TO suggest Paul Hudson is interested in the weather would be akin to saying John Motson follows football. Paul is fascinated by the weather, captivated by it; obsessed.

"I get out of bed at eight o'clock and the first thing I do is pull back the curtains to see if my evening forecast was right," he says. "If I have said it's going to be a nice, sunny day and it's raining, it can be pretty depressing."

That is rarer than you might think: Paul reckons four out of five of his predictions are on the money. But then, he has had plenty of practice.

Long before his cheery broadcasts on Radio York and Look North earned him an army of fans, Paul had his eyes fixed on the changing skies. He has been riveted by rain, fog, snow and wind for as far back as he can remember.

As a child in Keighley he once got soaked on his doorstep because he was transfixed by a terrific electric storm over Haworth and Hainworth. By the age of eight he had purchased a thermometer; a year later he had his own aneroid barometer; and as a ten year old he received his best ever Christmas present, "a wonderful Stevenson screen together with a max/min thermometer, psychrometer for measuring humidity, state of the art copper rain gauge, and anemometer wind force".

He took daily readings religiously for ten years, and also cut out newspaper weather reports. Soon he was in the local papers himself, as the West Ridings weather boy, and was interviewed on Calendar by Richard Whiteley.

So terrifying was the experience he vowed never to set foot in front of the cameras again.

Instead he concentrated on his dream to qualify as a meteorologist. He graduated with a physics degree from Newcastle University, and a year later joined the Met Office. During his training there, he was picked out as someone with telly potential and later landed the role of number two weather presenter on Look North.

Paul's first live TV broadcast left him a nervous wreck, with "a feeling that at any moment my heart would explode out of my chest". Soon he grew more comfortable in front of the cameras, but his love of meteorology was always stronger than his love of the media, and he went on to work at the international forecast unit in Bracknell, Berkshire.

But when Darren Bett was promoted from Look North to do the BBC's national weather, the offer to come back to his beloved Yorkshire proved too strong to resist.

Since then, his humorous exchanges with the likes of Elly Fiorentini on Radio York and Peter Levy on Look North have endeared him to the Yorkshire public.

The television persona and the real Paul Hudson are one and the same, he says. "It's me. At times I drive my wife mad. I suppose I am a little eccentric. I do enthuse about things and drive people around the bend."

He gets lots of fan mail. A recent letter from an 85-year-old widow who lives alone said he brightened up her day: "It's wonderful when people think like that. It makes my day."

Not all his correspondence is positive. "I am never flavour of the month with the tourist departments.

"The latest one was from Skegness tourist board. If you stand up and say it looks as though it's going to be a poor weekend on the coast, some people are going to listen to that and not go to the coast.

"It works both ways: you say it'll be a lovely weekend at the coast and it rains, and you get it in the neck from them."

Paul says ad libbing a live weather forecast is "not rocket science", but there is plenty of pressure in a job that sees him undertake 21 radio and TV broadcasts for Radios York, Leeds and Hull and Look North during a typical 10am-7pm day. And that is on top of his main job: compiling the forecasts from a host of data.

The hairiest moments are the outside broadcasts. Once he was at the Christmas lights switch-on at a Leeds shopping centre. A Bradford City supporter, Paul began winding up some of the Leeds United fans in the crowd. He hit our screens just as a fake snowball hit him - in the mouth. He couldn't speak.

"When that snowball landed in the back of my throat, that was an awful moment," he recalled. "You are live on air and you die.

"Those situations are very difficult because it depends on what the crowds are like. When Liverpool played Sheffield United, one of the fans chucked a can of beer over me. You have got to stay composed."

Paul and the former Yorkshire Television weather forecaster Bob Rust tell all about their TV highs and lows in a new book, Weather Or Not! It also goes into detail about the vagaries of the climate in this part of the world.

And the weather is getting weirder, as Paul confirms. "I have done Radio York and Look North for six years. This is the first year there hasn't been flooding anywhere across Yorkshire.

"Instead we got a dry spell which is compared with '59, '76 and '95. It's just incredible."

Climate change is happening, and it will mean more extreme weather, like the torrential rain in October 2000 which brought the floods to York and the surrounding area.

This could be part of a natural cycle, but all the models suggest that greenhouse gas pollution is a key cause. For a weatherman like Paul, this is "absolutely fascinating" - but also worrying.

For Paul himself, we can predict a future as bright as one of his jackets (he does get a small clothing allowance from the Met Office, he admits sheepishly).

In the summer he married Nicola, a journalist with the Hull office of Look North. They have moved from Knaresborough to Leeds, but Paul is "not remotely interested" in another move: to the national BBC in London.

"Radio York and Look North are fantastic because they allow me to express myself, to waffle on about the statistics and show pictures of empty reservoirs.

"If I went to London, it's very much a Bill Giles sausage factory."

At some point Paul and Nicola would like to start a family. He is already looking forward to their first child.

"I will buy them a weather station for their first birthday," he said.

Weather Or Not! The highs and lows of regional weather by Paul Hudson and Bob Rust is published by Great Northern, price £9.99

Updated: 09:31 Saturday, November 15, 2003