Live and dangerous

Pissing it down, or just torrential?
Thunderstorms in Leeds.
Photograph: John Giles/PAWeather presenter Joanne Malin has hit the headlines for describing conditions in the way the rest of us do when, live on Central TV, she said it was "pissing it down".

Far from being outraged, the public has leapt to her defence. "We got only two complaints," she says. "And I was amazed at the number of emails asking my editor not to be too hard on me as they hadn't laughed so much in years."

On-air cock-ups were once the province of sports presenters who, for many years, were the broadcast journalists most likely to be performing live and without scripts for long spells.

Colemanballs, such as Brian Johnston's comment during a 1976 cricket Test that "the bowler's Holding, the batsman's Willey", or Harry Carpenter's remark (scroll down) after the 1977 boat race about the wife of the Cambridge president "kissing the cox of the Oxford crew", have passed into legend.