When a young Paul Higgins sat through lectures in law and economics at Monash University in 1978, the last place he dreamt he’d ultimately wind up was in a television studio.
Yet it’s became his natural habitat, from where he’s been beamed into our homes on weeknights for nearly 40 years.
And so, as he approaches his final weather report for the ABC this Thursday, he’s been taking stock and reflecting on his storied career.
“I will miss coming in here and being with my colleagues,” he tells me.
“More so than anything else.”
Growing up with a journalist dad, Paul absorbed news almost by osmosis.
“Every day we used to get all the newspapers,” he says.
“At that stage there were three in the morning and one at night … so I’d just sit there and read it all.”
At 15, he got himself a low-power FM transmitter so he could broadcast his own home radio show to his neighbours in Caulfield.
He played records and tapes, and hooked the show up to the house landline so neighbours could call in.
That early obsession with radio saw him volunteer at 3CR, which led to a first paid job as a ‘cart-boy’ at 3MP, recording cartridges off ad reels.
A sink-or-swim moment came on a midnight-to-dawn shift when the regular presenter was off sick — he was suddenly on the air for real, and never looked back.
A familiar face for many, hosting Behind the News
At a friend’s insistence, Paul auditioned for the ABC’s long-running educational TV news show Behind the News (BTN) in 1986 and jagged the presenting role.
Before long Seven News also snaffled him to be their nightly weather presenter and he worked both jobs.
“When I started doing the weather at Seven,” he says, “we relied on faxes coming in from the weather bureau, which may or may not turn up, and they’d send in a weather map with isobars on it.
“It was just a black-and-white blurry map and someone in the graphics department would have to sit there and trace it all out and then fill in the temperatures.
“The satellite picture used to be couriered to us from the bureau, on this beautiful glossy map,” Paul says.
But it’s talking about his work as the anchor of Behind the News from 1986 to 1990 that gets a twinkle in his eye.
“I’m particularly proud of Behind the News because of the way it helped so many kids learn about what was going on in the world,” he says.
“The world can be a scary place.”
And during Paul’s stint at BTN, it was — the show helped young audiences grapple with the Chernobyl disaster, the Tiananmen Square protests and massacre, and the Gulf War.
“The Gulf War started on the same morning we were on … and we’re thinking ‘oh no, what do we do?’ — we were all worried about everything as well.
“So, we just had to throw together really quickly just a brief explanation … because it was all over the media.”
Between 1.5 and 2 million kids watched the program each week.
I have vivid memories of sitting cross-legged amongst my classmates on the carpet-tiled floor of my primary school’s TV room in the 80s.
Every Tuesday, a gigantic boxy brown set would be wheeled in on a trolley, plugged in with much fanfare and tuned to the ABC so we could all stare up at BTN.
Paul’s face and voice are some of my earliest televisual memories — to the extent that when I was allocated the desk next to his on my first day at ABC Southbank many years later, I was so starstruck, I needed a moment to compose myself.
It didn’t work.
I couldn’t help but gush through an earnest grin: “Hi Paul. I grew up watching you on TV.”
He was typically gracious and warm — he’d been dealing with fans for years by this point.
At the height of his BTN fame, he found himself having to cross the street to dodge tram stops heaving with school kids to avoid being mobbed.
And now, nearly four decades later, he’s still being approached in the street by viewers keen to get the scoop on what the weather’s doing.
“People will often stop and say ‘Oh, we love you doing the weather. What’s it going to be like today?’,” he says.
“I think it’s nice that they say something and that they’re appreciative of it.”
Paul brings warmth and professionalism to our screens
Perhaps the truest example of Paul’s professionalism was through a time of immense personal trauma and grief in the mid-90s, when his father and stepmother were brutally murdered, and the case and subsequent court proceedings played out in the media while he was a nightly TV news fixture.
Paul clearly remembers the afternoon that conman Edwin Lewis was finally found guilty after five arduous trials.
“It was a very strange news night because there I was on the steps of the Supreme Court, talking to the media … and then 20 minutes later I was on air presenting the weather,” he says.
“I was told I didn’t have to, of course, but I just thought I should.
“A few people got in touch to say: ‘It’s amazing you could do that, but your father would be so proud of you that you did’.”
By the early 2000s, Paul had been offered the permanent weather gig at the ABC in Melbourne. It was a time of transformative technological change and heralded the beginning of studio automation.
And the weather tech evolved too — the maps were delivered via computer each night, saving him hours with a graphic artist each day, preparing it all manually.
Since then, he’s talked us through floods and fires, heat waves and frosts — and given viewers the heads-up on “double-doona nights” in winter (when the temperature drops to 4 degrees and below, for those playing at home).
On his on-screen approach: “I’ve just thought about, how would I like to be spoken to? What information can I provide that’s relevant?
“Once you’ve been doing it for a while and people do begin to trust you, it heightens your feeling of responsibility in a way, and that’s a good thing.”
Every year, Paul features prominently in our newsroom Christmas bloopers tape — not because of his performance, but because of the many times he’s been stitched up by the technology and had to seamlessly manoeuvre his way out of a live television snafu.
It’s always done with good humour and grace.
Rogue cameras, a busted autocue, frozen weather graphics — nothing throws him off his game.
The guy is unflappable.
And it’s a joy to watch.
Paul says he has very mixed feelings about leaving the ABC and that he’s had a few sleepless nights.
“It’ll be great to go back to being an observer of the weather — enjoying a good thunderstorm and everything without sitting there having to think ‘how am I going to write about this? Are we getting pictures?'” he says.
“Leaving after all this time is very strange, but I’m getting on, and as they say, I’ve had a good innings … so it’s time to find out what else life has to offer.”
Go well, Paul. We’ll miss you.