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Friday Flashback: Robina Beard presents the weather
Things were very hi-tech back in 1965 ...
- Published by David Knox
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Actress Robina Beard may be best known as Palmolive’s own manicurist Madge (“You know you’re soaking in it”) but across her varied showbiz career she was also GTV9’s first weather girl.
Things were very hi-tech back in 1965 as this video demonstrates (and yes those are farenheit temps!)
Her many TV credits included Number 96, Kingswood Country, Bullpitt!, All Saints, and as recently as last year in Last King of the Cross.
7 Responses
So nothing much has changed in 50+ years. Even today the weather presenters just tell us what we can see on the map…. With no further info. Ie. Melbourne will be cloudy and 18 degs (on screen map shows a cloud icon with 18 next to it). I wonder why they Bother with weather presenters! Worst offenders commercial breakfast weather presenters. They just say what we Dan see on screen.
More focus on visiting the local scout group than adding info to weather!
A lot of people are blind or have low vision and not everyone can see, or see clearly, the numbers on the screen. Hence, reading it out makes it accessible.
People also aren’t necessarily gazing at the screen but listening to what’s being said.
I was just thinking “imagine if she had to write temperatures backwards too”, then she wrote temperatures backwards!
The weather presenter was facing the map the right way around and writing the numbers as normal, but the picture was flipped around so it appeared that they were writing the numbers backwards from behind the screen!
I still can’t figure out how that works…so the map was back to front to Robina then?
She was looking at a map of Victoria on a perspex screen in the correct orientation, and drawing the weather patterns and writing the numbers in front of her as normal. The camera, on the other side of the clear screen, sees the map in reverse (i.e. the eastern tip of Victoria is camera left, and the Vic-SA border is camera right) and Robina’s writing in reverse. The vision is flipped around, so that the viewer is seeing the map/writing the correct way around, giving the illusion that Robina is writing “backwards” from behind the perspex.
Very hi-tech, no horoscopes? 🤣