Is it Dynasty or the BBC weather centre? It's sometimes hard to tell

Krystle v Alexis in the lily pond, Krystle v Alexis in the mud spa, Krystle v Alexis with the pillows, Krystle v Alexis in the fashion closet, Alexis v Sable at the cocktail party, Alexis v Dominique in the apricot guest suite, Sammy Jo v Fallon in the horse trough, Sammy Jo v Amanda in the pool, Krystle v Evil Krystle in the cellar, Bill Giles v Michael Fish in the BBC weather office.

To the canon of television's most edifying catfights must be added another chapter, as former Beeb weatherman Bill Giles breaks another 15-minute silence about that forecast, and claims his more junior colleague Michael Fish was always bitter about Bill's meteoric meteorological rise. Fish formed an alliance with fellow Met Office A-lister John Kettley, apparently, with the aim of overthrowing Giles, who seems to fancy himself as having seen off this assassination attempt much in the manner of Albert Finney tommy-gunning his way out of his house and down the street in Miller's Crossing. Yeah, turns out Bill's still an artist with a Thompson. Not like "bitter" Ian McCaskill, who once dismissed him as acting like "a prefect at a minor public school".

You have to say, Bill really does seem like a lovely man. He's got a book coming out, if this lively teaser campaign contrives to secure a publisher – a searing backstage portrait of BBC weather forecasting 1983-2000, which would make the perfect present for someone to whom you wished to deliver a calculated insult. A large shipment of the audio version is believed to be on its way for use in Guantánamo Bay.

Written with his longtime editor John Teather – another one his rival forecasters were always said to have loathed – the book is racily entitled You Have Wives?, which is sure to secure the services of Clooney and DiCaprio for the inevitable film version. The oddest thing said about the opus thus far is that it has "reignited" the feud between the forecasting division of the era, when in truth that one has been burning longer than the Springfield Tyre Fire (est 1989). Perhaps the only Beeb department of the period that could have rivalled it as a hotbed of seething resentment was Radio 1, whose disc jockeys were locked in such rabid internecine conflict that John Peel later confessed to having once formed a posse with Kid Jensen and Paul Burnett, left the station Christmas party, "and waited in the underground car park for the opportunity to beat up Simon Bates".

Happily – HAPPILY – Bates didn't show, just as attempts to dethrone Giles were thwarted down the years. In 1999, he survived a drive-by bullying tribunal. As Teather observes mildly: "The animals were baying for blood."

And so to the meat of You Have Wives?, whose Partridgean dedication page reads: "Written at the Villa Francia, Lanzarote, Canaries. The authors would like to thank Villa Plus for helping with the difficult internet connections."

It's all there: the plot to overthrow them; the road trips, where they admire the beautiful air hostesses whispering the offer of breakfast in their ears; the night they got aroused by a Bangkok stripper only to discover with the removal of the final garment that she was a ladyboy. The book is unabashed in stating its purpose – it is designed "to help future generations of weather forecasters", in order that they may safeguard the "lives and property" of an otherwise benighted people.

A gift to the nation that is almost beyond price. Needless to say, though, the standout line in the excerpts published has been Bill's return to a certain fateful night in 1987. "I understand it was put in the Guinness Book of Records as the worst forecast in the history of the universe," declares Bill of Michael Fish's famous cock-up, "and it if wasn't, it should have been."

Man alive, that bloody hurricane ... I don't think I've heard nearly enough about it, do you? At the time, it seemed like an almost unfathomably massive event, given that the lengthy power cut it caused prevented my 13-year-old self from watching telly at half term.

But nearly 26 years later, with the apparent insistence of thrice-annual, angst-ridden media memorials to the Fish broadcast, I have come to realise that it was bigger even than that.

It was a defining psychological event in the life of the nation. In fact, if you wanted to pinpoint the precise historical moment at which Britain realised we had been admitted to the twilight home of international life, that erroneous weather report was it. For what other possible reason could we still be talking about it, and with such masochistic frequency? For a country as self-consciously obsessed with the weather as this one is, the failure to be able to predict even a hurricane evidently represented the most savage of epiphanies. Whatever figleaf of national dignity was left to us after Suez was ripped away that very night, and we have been shivering in the waste spaces ever since, clinging to our nuclear weapons and our seat on the security council as if they in any way make up for our greybeards' inability to spot a whole hurricane on their radar.

I say "radar", but of course, few genuinely believe the Met office to hold faith with such new-fangled technology, when the old ways have seen our tribe right for millennia. The instruments of their craft have long been suspected to be entrails, with whichever haruspex is in charge of foretelling things that day poking through them with a stick, simulating a hypnotic trance, and deploying a stagily guttural groan to communicate the prediction "a bit unsettled".

Not for us the hi-tech, cutthroat world of American weather wars, with even local news stations locked in an arms race to acquire the latest eleventy billion dollar Doppler radar system, and the very real sense that viewers expect something other than quasi-genial incompetence.

No, for us, there is only the trying. For us, there is only the memory of relevance. For us, there are men like Bill Giles.