Ian McCaskill, who has died aged 78, was one of the best recognised faces on the BBC for 20 years in his role as a weather forecaster. His diffident delivery and gentle Scottish accent were much admired. He always tried to lighten up his presentation. Seeing that there was little entertainment value in the reports themselves, he tried to deliver them with descriptive one-liners.

“I think I was good,” he said later. “I cheered up people – and I irritated a lot of Englishmen who didn’t like an ethnic Scot delivering the weather.” When he started, in 1978, it was still unusual for BBC presenters to have regional accents. In 1994 McCaskill was voted Britain’s sexiest weather presenter and often received affectionate fan mail.

By the time he retired in 1998, though, he was thoroughly relieved to have done with his work pattern – the routine was shifts from either 9pm to 9am or 5am to 3pm. “I’d paid my debt to society,” he said. “The conditions of service for weather forecasters at the BBC are universally crap.” He pointed out that as a Met Office employee he was paid civil service rates and not those of a TV personality. But he had nonetheless become a celebrity and was among those impersonated by Rory Bremner. He was also lampooned with his own Spitting Image puppet – considered the ultimate flattery in the 1980s.

The forecasts did not always get it right, or even nearly right. In 1987, his colleague Michael Fish was ridiculed for saying a hurricane was not going to happen, just a few hours before it did. Later – much later, 18 years in fact – McCaskill confessed to being the guilty party who had given Fish the forecast that day.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Ian McCaskill, right, with fellow forecaster Michael Fish in 1991. Photograph: David Fisher/Rex/Shutterstock

Though McCaskill took his leave of the BBC without tears, he continued to pop up on TV. In 1999 he appeared in a BBC2 series called The Essential Guide to Weather, saying that he was being paid tuppence ha’penny, but it should give people a laugh. But he did not do too badly: he made commercials, personal appearances and after-dinner speeches. He also appeared in pantomimes, though the audience was apt to laugh delightedly at him rather than to boo as required.

He was born John Robertson McCaskill, the son of an insurance agent, in Glasgow, and attended Queen’s Park school and Glasgow University, where he studied geology and chemistry. He was then small enough to cox for the university rowing club. He also joined the dramatic society. His first ambition was to be a doctor but his parents could not afford to keep him at university for six years, so he decided to opt for a teaching career.

But when he was called up into the RAF, his scientific background led to him being put through meteorological college and after two years he found that it seemed to have better career prospects than teaching. He worked for the RAF from 1959 as a meteorologist, including a spell in Malta, where he met his first wife, Lesley Charlesworth, a teacher, with whom he had two daughters, Vicky and Kirsty.

As a civilian, he became one of the 2,000 civil servants working in the Met Office. When volunteers were sought to present TV weather forecasts, he was selected. It meant that he and Lesley had to move from Manchester, where they were very comfortable, to London and a more uncertain future.

McCaskill always tried to retain the light touch but latterly felt that technology had expelled humour from forecasting and that there was no place for Met people in what he called “youth-orientated TV”. Long before retirement from the Met Office, he was already casting his thoughts in a new direction by taking a degree at the Open University, studying science in the form of geology but also computing, electronics, sociology, statistics and mathematics.

In 2002 he joined ITV’s Celebrity Fit Club. Though slight tubbiness – at 5ft 9in he weighed more than 15 stone – had been part of his television persona, he managed to lose two stone to raise money for charity, later proclaiming that he no longer felt 64 but about 30.

In 2006, together with Paul Hudson, another weatherman, he wrote a book, Frozen in Time, about Britain’s harshest winters.

Lesley died of breast cancer in 1992. Six years later, he married Pat Cromack, a family friend. She and his daughters survive him, along with two stepsons, Tim and Matthew, and nine grandchildren.

• Ian McCaskill (John Robertson McCaskill), weather forecaster, born 28 July 1938; died 10 December 2016

• Dennis Barker died last year