Fragman88 (what happened to the preceding 87 I wonder) Sorry for jangling your nerves with the word Tephigram, I promise not to mention theta -w's, mintra or drytra......doh, too late.
I'm on my hols in the sunny Baltic at the moment and the weather forescast on Estonia TV is followed immediately by the frigging horoscopes. I take back all I said about the UK telly forecasts. Never mind, it's 8/8 CAVOK and the local time is beer o'clock.
Ref the storm on October 15-16 1987, I was at the European Centre for Medium Range Weather Forecasting (ECMWF or Early Closing Monday, Wednesday and Fridays as we called it) for a couple of months secondment and those dastardly Frogs were on strike comme toujours. There were no reports out of Biscay hence we didn't see it coming.
The "old lady" mentioned by Michael Fish who called in to warn of a hurricane was ... as rumour has it.... a senior BBC forecaster with the initials BG. He was referring to the remnants of a tropical storm that had the potential to undergo "explosive deepening". Perhaps BG had seen the horoscope on Scanditelly ?