Derek Brockway is leaving BBC Wales at Christmas, 29 years after his first Wales Today forecast. He told viewers on Tuesday evening: “I’ll be with you until Christmas, but don’t ask me yet if it’s a white one.”
The decision, he said in a statement on X, “certainly hasn’t been an easy one”. “I’m excited about what comes next, but I’m not saying goodbye just yet. And who knows? I may pop up again from time to time in the future.”
The walks that came to Gower
Weatherman Walking, the series that took him out of the studio for the best part of two decades, came to Swansea Bay more than once. In February 2017 he was shown around Three Cliffs Bay by his fellow forecaster Behnaz Akhgar, and in 2021 he walked the north Gower saltmarsh from Cwm Ivy to Llanrhidian, rounding up sheep and trying his hand at weaving, while the same episode went surfing at Caswell.
He opened the Gower Walking Festival at Rhossili in June 2012. The series ran until 2024; a best-of compilation is in its second run on BBC One Wales.
The night Mumbles flooded
When more than a month’s rain fell on Swansea in 24 hours in September 2024, it was his figures for Mumbles that told people how bad it had been. This summer’s heatwave, the Beast from the East in 2018 and Storm Dennis in 2020 all came with him standing in front of the map.
Barry boy, Met Office man
His fascination with the weather, he says, “began during the long, hot summer of 1976, when I was just eight years old, growing up in Barry”. He joined the Met Office in 1986, “achieving a lifelong ambition”, and his career took him to Birmingham, Bracknell, London and the Falkland Islands before he came home to BBC Wales in September 1997.
Along the way came the fancy-dress outside broadcasts of the late 1990s, a cameo as himself in Gavin and Stacey, a job swap with Carwyn Jones for Children in Need in 2013, and a British Empire Medal in 2023, which he called “a great honour, especially for doing the job I love”.
“Colourful ties”
His thanks in the statement went to colleagues, and then to viewers: “Your messages, conversations, letters, poems, colourful ties and wonderful weather photographs have all been much appreciated.”
“Together we’ve navigated all types of weather, sunshine and snow, storms and heatwaves, and everything in between. And I’ve been incredibly lucky to share it with you.”
“Diolch yn fawr iawn.”
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