Into each life, a little rain must fall. Even if it has been a very good, sunny life where you have risen to the top in a successful career stretching back 40 years and have a solid, happy marriage with two grown-up children.

Even if you own a house and a plot of land straight from the pages of Homes & Gardens in the sort of Oxfordshire village that used to adorn chocolate box lids and enjoy a modest degree of national fame to boot.

Eventually, black clouds gather on everyone's horizons - even if you are the nation's favourite avuncular weatherman. At 59, Bill Giles, OBE, should be preparing to stop and sniff the roses that bloom in his 350ft Chinnor garden. Instead, the autumn of his career is being permeated by the sour whiff of accusation and denial, ill-winds impossible to forecast, even for Bill Giles.

During his years on television, he has always come across as a kindly, dependable, wise uncle. There may have been storms ahead, but his reassuring presence at the end of the evening news bulletins could be relied on to offer some no-nonsense, professional comfort. Yet now he finds himself called to account for his conduct at work - or misconduct, as some would have it.

Together with BBC editor John Teather, Mr Giles stands accused of "harassing" and "bullying" members of the 21 staff of whom he is in charge. Mr Teather aside, there will be those who will be genuinely shocked at the very notion that the man who has been coming into their living rooms all these years could be anything other than the sort you would regard as a welcome guest - yet it is doubtful that either 44-year old Richard Edgar or his 48-year old colleague David Lee will be planning any parties with their boss Bill as the guest of honour in the foreseeable future.

Both forecasters are currently off work, on long-term sick leave, after alleging that Giles and Teather's style of man-management contained elements of "cruelty, bullying and harassment".

Complaints of nasty e-mails, snide memos and unpleasant reports appear to have been upheld by the BBC, who refuse to comment further than to say that the investigation is continuing.

Seated in the comfortable living room of the family bungalow, Mr Giles is just like his television image - friendly, smiling and charming. Yet you need only spend a few moments in his company to suspect that this is a man who doesn't suffer fools gladly.

"You're absolutely right," he says. The "bullying" allegations must have hurt him, but he says: "The charges of misconduct against the pair of us came after 21 staff had been interviewed and they'd picked three or four who had a few gripes. "Everyone on television thinks that he or she is the best - and so they should, or they shouldn't be there - so you have some egomaniacs who always want to be on primetime, and if some are moved away from that, they get upset about it.

"But the big problem with charges of bullying - and I don't like that word, it's terrible - is that if you are perceived to have done it, it's difficult. These charges have been a worry to me - after all, I'm not a machine, I'm a human being. In fact, I'm a big softie, really."

Be that as it may, Bill Giles is not the type to growl quietly in the corner. His bite is probably every bit as powerful as his bark, and when he's attacked, he bites back.

"Television weather forecasters are 'stars', I suppose, but to us - management - they're resources.

"If you're head of services as I am, and you make a decision people don't like, they throw their hands up and say it's harassment.

"They moan about the work roster, they moan about having to keep their mobile phones switched on - it's not easy, but the whole business of management is that we be allowed to manage. That is what I believe. Forecasters can double their salary by being on the box. When they aren't, it's a hell of a drop."

Mr Giles became interested in the weather when he was still a scholarship boy at a small public school near Exeter in his native Devon. He joined the Met Office straight from Bristol College and after a successful voice-test, moved into broadcasting. He has fond memories of the times when forecasters had a vocabulary all of their own. "We couldn't say 'flooding', for instance, because that impinged on other parts of the Met Office service. We had to say 'excess surface water' instead. 'Sunny intervals' meant sunshine less than half of the time and 'sunny periods' was sunshine more than half of the time.

"'Occasional showers' meant 50 per cent of the day would be wet. 'Isolated' was ten per cent. Our job was to turn jargon into everyday language," he recalls.

And it was a job he clearly loved, even if his private life wasn't all sweetness and light. Although his first marriage failed, he is happily married to his second wife Maureen and they have two grown-up children, Philip and Helen. But for a long time, his privacy and family happiness was clouded by the stalking obsession of the niece of his first marriage, Joanna Toner, who was convinced that Bill Giles was her natural father.

With a bluntness bordering on cruelty, he scoffs: "If you'd have seen her mother, you'd realise what a ridiculous statement that was."

Eleven years ago, the country was shocked to hear how he had been the victim of an obsessive campaign waged by his niece. For some time Mr Giles and his wife, Maureen, lived in fear that his niece - a 37-year-old mother of two - would be driven to commit acts of violence.

He said at the time: "It got to the point where I thought if I wasn't on television any more she might leave me alone.

"I have been trying to get people to give this poor woman help for years but nothing happened."

Divorced ex-nurse Joanna was to plead guilty to two charges of phoning bomb hoaxes to the BBC and Channel 5 - but her real target was always her Uncle Bill. For more than seven years, his niece, he says, bombarded him with letters and postcards. "I used to get some strange looks from people in the village.

"At one point, I was receiving seven or eight letters a day. And I think that the village postmistress had to retire because of the things she could read on the postcards. It's a very, very sad story.

"Joanna was a little wayward when she was young and I was the only one who used to defend her.

"Her solicitors still have a go at me and want me to have a DNA test - I don't have a problem with that, but even if the test was negative, she'd say that it had been tampered with," he claims.

"Harassment?" he snorts. "I'm well aware what harassment means." His niece's sad obsession was to eventually result in her imprisonment.

Like everyone, Mr Giles has known his hard times. The jolly man on the weather forecast wasn't born with a fixed grin on his face and television is only a two-dimensional image anyway.

But even if the current misconduct investigation means that his career is to end under a cloud, you get the feeling that he'll remain his own man.

Come rain, hail or shine.

Story date: Saturday 23 October

Converted for the new archive on 30 June 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.