A Love Letter To Tim Bailey, Australia’s Oddest Weatherman
Leave out your brollys.
Yesterday, Channel 10 announced it was letting several major figures go from the network as part of cost-cutting measures , including Kerri-Anne Kennerley, Natarsha Belling and NSW weatherman Tim Bailey. With almost 30 years of reporting for CH10, Bailey was a weird, wacky figure in many lives — and with the announcement he’d be leaving, tributes poured in across social media.
“Tim Bailey has done the weather with humour and excitement before I was even born,” wrote one Twitter user. “He always made the weather fun to watch and will be missed.”
While those who grew up outside of NSW don’t quite understand, Bailey holds a special spot in many hearts for his erratic, somewhat chaotic and often yelled forecast delivery, as well as his well-worn lines about “business of the brolley” and “drips and drops across rooftops”.
While he’s moved timeslots across the years, most remember him for popping up 10 News just before The Simpsons at 6pm, which means Bailey is clearly wrapped up in a lot of nostalgia for a heap of 20 and 30somethings.
That prompted a real outpouring of emotion on social media — in the words of Daily Mail reporter Daniel Piotrowski, “part of Channel 10’s soul just died.” (He wasn’t the only one to say it, either).
someone else needs to pick him up to read the weather after he gets back from his surfing trip (I'm assuming he's gonna go get in the green room for a bit to chill out)
— creamy (@courtwhip) August 11, 2020
Tim Bailey is unique in Australian broadcasting because he's the only guy who never tries to have a political opinion, and just delivers the same crowd pleasing performance every night, like a benign relic of the 1950s TV golden age.
— John Macgowan (@john_macgowan) August 11, 2020
If Channel 10 can’t afford Tim Bailey’s salary (annual supply of board wax, all the leftovers from the Studio 10 cooking segments, a used Corolla from a Pickles fleet auction every 5 years) things must be pretty dire.
— Big Jez (@THE_REAL_BIGJEZ) August 11, 2020
Here’s to Bailey, a staple of Australian TV who exudes a wholesome ‘Tim Winton character but in a sitcom’ energy, and whose sheer enthusiasm for reading the weather live from locations across Sydney lit up living rooms for decades.
Thankfully, Bailey will still be on our screens for a little while longer: his redundancy takes effect on September 14. More than 24 staff have been affected, with additional voluntary redundancies also reportedly on the table.
Find below two of his most exemplary moments — fighting against a brutal 2012 Sydney storm by moving across the city during the broadcast when he simply should have just retreated, and that one time he “got beat up by teenage girls”.