And now for the weather forecast: 'It's pissing down'

It is the sort of language one might expect from Roger Mellie, Viz comic's gloriously profane Man on the Telly, as a matter of course.

But coming from girl-next-door local TV presenter Joanne Malin, it was particularly refreshing.

After nearly a decade of live broadcasting, during which time a curse has never passed her immaculately made-up lips, Ms Malin's swear-free record foundered in spectacular style this week.

Asked by the studio anchor during Central TV's evening bulletin what the weather was like at the outside broadcast location Trentham Gardens, near Stoke-on-Trent, she gave her army of fans her candid appraisal of the situation. "It's pissing down," she reported.

The former graduate of the Italia Conti School, who appeared in Jack and the Beanstalk at the Birmingham Hippodrome with Russ Abbot before pursuing a career in journalism, was yesterday apologetic about her blunder. "I meant to say it was tipping down," she said.

"When I realised what I had said I immediately corrected myself and said, 'Oh, I'm sorry I should have said it is really raining quite heavily'."

She added: "It was the final leg of our bus tour and we have been doing it every Wednesday in August. We had been lucky because the weather had been really good on all the other days but when we came to go on air this time, the heavens just opened and my script completely disintegrated."

She said she had been delighted with the support from viewers.

"We received two complaints but I was amazed at the number of e-mails that came in from viewers asking my editor not to be too hard on me as they hadn't laughed so much in years.

"It was my first on-air faux pas in eight and a half years on Central and I am so sorry," she said. " News is always live and we are real people so things like this do happen from time to time.

"I am going to try to avoid doing any weather reports from now on, but to be on the safe side, next time it rains I am going to call it precipitation."

After taking a broadcast journalism course, Ms Malin worked on Live TV and read the radio news on the Virgin breakfast show. She has also been a presenter on Sky News.

Her celebrity has spread far beyond the West Midlands, however. She said she was once recognised in a fish and chip shop in Mount Maunganui, New Zealand.

However, Ms Malin's blunt forecast is unlikely to apply to the weather over the bank holiday weekend.

A PA WeatherCentre spokesman, Matt Dobson, said: "It's not going to be too bad a bank holiday for weather, with reasonable amounts of sunshine without anything like the heat we had earlier in the summer."

Early rain should clear on Saturday to be followed by showers and sunny spells, while Sunday will be generally cloudier.