WINCEY WILLIS, SPARKY 1980S ‘WEATHER GIRL’ WHO HELPED RESCUE TV-AM’S GOOD MORNING BRITAIN
Wincey Willis, who has died aged 76, became a smiley and ebullient star of breakfast television when she joined TV-am as its weather presenter shortly after it started broadcasting in 1983.
Her arrival on Good Morning Britain was intended to bring brightness to the cloudy outlook that beset ITV’s first national breakfast service when its upmarket approach had viewers switching to the rival BBC offering, Breakfast Time.
Greg Dyke was brought in as editor-in-chief to overhaul the station and rescue the dire ratings, which were as low as 200,000 after two months on air. Clive Jones, his deputy, suggested recruiting Wincey Willis after spotting her on ITV in the Tyne Tees region, as Dyke told Ian Jones, author of Morning Glory: A History of British Breakfast Television.
“Have you seen this weather girl on Tyne Tees?” Clive Jones asked Dyke. “Well, no, but let’s have a look,” replied Dyke, and after seeing her at work he said: “OK, phone her up and get her.’ ”
The pair were impressed by her sparky personality and enthusiasm, while her spiky mullet hairstyle made her distinctive, winning her the 1986 Head of the Year competition. On the weekday show she replaced David Philpott, a retired naval commander, who was switched to weekends. He had been one of the “faces” of TV-am’s launch alongside the so-called Famous Five presenters, David Frost, Anna Ford, Angela Rippon, Michael Parkinson and Robert Kee, all of whom were sacked or sidelined.
Nick Owen had already taken over as Frost’s replacement when Dyke began a revamp that had Anne Diamond joining Owen as a main presenter and featured a new exercise slot with “Mad Lizzie” Webb and, famously, merriment with the puppet rodent Roland Rat. Within months, Good Morning Britain had overtaken Breakfast Time in the ratings.
TV-am’s switch to the more laidback approach of its rival was reflected in the on-screen team’s dress sense. Some viewers, impressed by Wincey Willis’s sweaters, even got out their knitting needles to send in new additions to her wardrobe.
Wincey Willis would say that she was “not a meteorologist, but a presenter”, and she blazed a trail for other female breakfast-time weather forecasters such as Trish Williamson and Ulrika Jonsson, who also showed their versatility in branching out into other programmes.
“Most people don’t want to know about high pressure over the Azores,” she told the Liverpool Echo. “All they care about is whether they need their umbrella.”
Constantly looking out for new ideas, Dyke gave further airtime to Wincey Willis when she revealed that she owned 82 pets – including waifs and strays with disabilities such as having only one wing or eye – at her home near Barnard Castle in Co Durham.
“Wincey and Friends” became a slot featuring the weather presenter with some of her menagerie. This, along with delivering hampers over Christmas 1983 to viewers designated “unsung heroes”, confirmed her as a versatile TV personality whose skills went well beyond weather. Later, she fronted a weekly “Animal Watch” feature.
Her fame extended further when she became the adjudicator on five series of the Channel 4 game show Treasure Hunt, from 1984 to 1989. In 1987 she walked out on TV-am when she reportedly refused to sign a new contract because Bruce Gyngell, managing director of the station, wanted to take the show upmarket, and banned her from presenting anything other than weather.
After a decade as a celebrity – her treasured status confirmed when she was hired to endorse Walkers crisps in TV commercials – Wincey Willis left the small screen behind to fulfil her ambitions in nature conservation, starting by monitoring the breeding habits of turtles in Greece.
She later returned to broadcasting as a regional radio presenter for the BBC, but animal welfare remained her priority. Expressing surprise that she had ever found fame on screen, she told an interviewer: “My new life has been more fulfilling than television could ever have been.”
She was born Florence Winsome Leighton in Gateshead on August 8 1948 to a single mother; she was adopted as a baby by Florence, née Brown, and Thomas Dimmock, and brought up in Hartlepool. She used her middle name – “The kids at infant school started calling me Wincey when we learnt the nursery rhyme Incey Wincey Spider” – and had a strict Baptist childhood.
“I always wanted to be a vet when I was a kid, but I wasn’t clever enough,” she told the Newcastle Evening Chronicle in 2013. On leaving Hartlepool High School for Girls, she took the equivalent of A-levels in France and studied at Strasbourg University.
She was then a travel courier in Tunisia before returning to Britain and becoming a rep for DJM Records. From 1975, she worked in the record library and promotions department at the newly launched North East commercial station Radio Tees (now Hits Radio). She made her broadcasting debut there that year as co-presenter of a Saturday-morning show with Les Ross.
At her home in a former railway station near Barnard Castle, Wincey Willis kept dogs, cats, rabbits, tortoises, tropical birds, iguanas, fish, a pygmy goat and other creatures. In 1981, she appeared with her giant terrapin when Tyne Tees Television wanted a “monster” for its regional children’s show Saturday Shake-Up.
“Then, when the local news wanted to do an item about exotic pets, they needed someone who could handle the animals,” she recalled. “They asked me to try it and that’s how it all began. They needed someone to read the weather, so the producer asked me if I wanted to audition.”
While forecasting sun, rain, gales, cold fronts and other permutations on Northern Life from 1981 to 1983, she also hosted Wincey’s Pets, a 1982 national ITV series giving pet-care advice to under-fives.
In 1986, while at TV-am, her book of animal anecdotes, It’s Raining Cats and Dogs, was published and Waddingtons marketed The Weather Game, a board game she devised. Two years later, she presented the series ECO, featuring plants and animals, for Central, ITV’s Midlands franchisee.
Alongside her conservation work in the following decade, Wincey Willis worked for Wiggly Wigglers, a worm composting company, and made a brief return to television with a wildlife slot in the regional show Tyne Tees Weekend in 1993.
Later, she switched to radio, presenting her own shows on BBC Coventry & Warwickshire (2006-09), then The Big Day Out, a Saturday programme, on BBC Hereford & Worcester (2010-12).
After being diagnosed with fronto-temporal dementia in 2015, she returned to the North East to live in Sunderland. News of her death in December has only just been announced.
Her 1972 marriage to Malcolm Willis ended in divorce.
Wincey Willis, born August 8 1948, died December 19 2024
2025-06-18T11:32:19Z