Forecast: Persistent Smirk, Turning to Cutaways by Lunchtime

There is a face the nation demands from its weather presenters: pleasant, neutral, faintly apologetic about the rain. It is the televisual equivalent of a beige cardigan. And so, naturally, I decided to ruin it.

My plan was simple, stupid and entirely in keeping with this publication's editorial standards: I would sit in the studio audience — an audience of one, because it was me and a man called Trevor who'd wandered in from the car park — and hold the Mona Lisa's enigmatic smirk directly behind the forecaster's shoulder, live on regional breakfast telly, for as long as the BBC would tolerate it.

Monday: Look North, and Look Worried

Newcastle went first. The presenter, a consummate professional with the unshakeable calm of a man who has said 'chilly up the coast' ten thousand times, clocked me within four seconds. His eyes flicked to the monitor. His eyebrows performed a small, private crisis. But he carried on. 'A fine day across the Tyne valley,' he said, while behind him I beamed five centuries of Renaissance smugness directly into the nation's porridge.

He lasted eleven minutes. Then a floor manager materialised like a disapproving ghost and I was 'invited' to continue my artistic journey elsewhere.

Tuesday: Midlands Today, More Like Midlife Crisis Today

Birmingham was bolder. The forecaster leaned into it. At one point she gestured at the weather map with such panache that my smirk briefly cracked into an actual laugh, which any art historian will tell you is a hanging offence. The Louvre would have revoked my licence.

She made it fourteen minutes — a personal best — before the gallery of regional pressure systems defeated us both.

The Rankings, Because We Must

• Look North (Newcastle): 11 minutes. Dignified exit. 8/10.
• Midlands Today: 14 minutes. Crowd-pleaser energy. 9/10.
• Points West (Bristol): 6 minutes. Cut to shipping forecast mid-sentence about cloud cover. Brutal. 5/10.
• Reporting Scotland: 19 minutes. Either tolerance or they simply didn't notice me. Unknowable. 10/10.

What We Learned About the Nation's TV Face

The British public requires its weather presenters to be reassuring, and its background extras to be invisible. Combine the two and you get a small national emergency conducted at 6:57am.

But there's something deeper here. We spend fortunes on 'TV-ready' faces — the teeth, the brows, the unlined forehead of a woman who has never once worried about a northerly wind — and yet the most famous face in art history is a woman whose entire appeal is that you cannot tell what she's thinking. She'd never get the weather slot. She'd barely get the shipping forecast.

Friday: The Shipping Forecast Intervenes

By the end of the week, Trevor had joined me in smirking. We were removed together, as a duo, from the Bristol studio, and I like to think that somewhere, in a green room drawer, there's a note that reads: 'No more Renaissance women.'

The Mona Lisa waited five hundred years for her close-up. I lasted a week. She's still the better professional.