IT’S RAINING TELEVISION WEATHERMEN/COMICS!

We’re having a heat wave on TV too.

The hottest thing on some TV news programs is not the news; it’s weathercasters who cut down on weathercasting and cut up for the camera, real wild and crazy zanies who probably stand on tables and wear lamp shades on their heads at parties.

These are TV news monologists who want more from life than heavy downpours, softball-sized hail, low-lying fog, overcast skies, humidity, smog and high pressure zones. Their talents are too sprawling for mere meteorology. They are. . . .

Weathertainers.

Their guru remains Willard Scott, the NBC “Today” show’s very own weatherwhopper, a fast-talking bag of easterly wind who blows far and wide. “Today” spends most of its time in New York, but Willard can turn up anywhere, wearing anything.

Friday, the day after Independence Day, he is in Greenville, S.C. He is wearing a white cowboy hat.

“I just want to say good morning, Greenville,” Scott says before cheerfully babbling about 200 hot-air balloons that will soon take to the skies. Finally, he wedges in a weathercast.

Scott later shows up wearing a white baseball-style cap as he stands beside a state senator carrying a small pig. Scott kisses the pig.

Whatta card. Whatta whatta Willard.

Willard once appeared on camera in drag, his rotundness filling the screen as a combination Chiquita Banana/Carmen Miranda. On TV, nothing is ever quite what it is supposed to be.

Scott has competition. Grinning young Turks are everywhere.

Same morning. Steve Baskerville, the awesomely affable weathercaster on “The CBS Morning News,” is standing atop the tallest building in St. Louis, wearing a St. Louis Cardinals baseball cap, the city’s famous Arch in the background. Baskerville doesn’t know a straight face from a straight flush. You get the impression that he smiles at trees.

He also has gone Willard one further in his role as the CBS program’s weathertainer/reportertainer. His weather reports today (“the hit-and-miss showers”) are edgework on his profile of St. Louis. “We’re gonna recoup yesterday and show you some places,” he begins.

On a show where apparently everyone who stumbles into the studio becomes a reporter, Baskerville someday may be required to make a transition between interviewing a head of state and reporting a blizzard in Colorado.

Two stories, two snow jobs.

It’s ironic that “Today” and “The CBS Morning News,” which are both produced by their networks’ news divisions, should have show-bizzier weathercasters than “Good Morning America,” which is under ABC’s entertainment division. Most of the time.

Same day. “Good morning, everyone,” says Dave Murray on “Good Morning America.” Murray is the show’s Boy Scout, as open and as happy as someone with a sash full of merit badges for helping old ladies across the street.

Murray is also in St. Louis, talking about hot dogs, then walking down a carnival midway, squeezing in some weathercasting and really being outrageous by going hatless. The competitive pressure is immense, though, and Murray finally plays ball. When he returns in another segment, he puts on a Cardinals cap.

Weathercasters come from a long tradition of stunts that have included token females as “weather girls” (Diane Sawyer was one in Louisville) and infantile gizmos such as flashing weather symbols and magnetic dark clouds or umbrellas to signify rain. Now the weathercasters themselves are the gizmos: gloriously paid news performers who are big box office if not always big talents.

The local weather spot is now either big production--with the weathercaster, a la Kevin O’Connell of KCBS Channel 2, appearing on location outside the studio--or big comedy. The standard dumb bit is for the anchor to blame the weathercaster for bad weather, as if he personally brought the rain.

When it comes to weathertaining, no city tops Los Angeles, where jiving “Dr. George” Fischbeck (the degree is honorary) has been known to get so carried away on KABC-TV Channel 7’s “Eyewitness News” that he forgets to give the forecast. And his former backup--a cornball named Johnny Mountain--used his time on the air to pour out awful one-liners.

“Eyewitness” has not been the only tap dancer in town. Pat Sajak tells fewer jokes as host of “Wheel of Fortune” than he did as weathercaster on KNBC Channel 4, where he once pulled a coat hanger from his jacket on the air and handed it to an anchor.

Take my hanger--please!

KNBC’s newly promoted first-string weatherman, the joke-cracking Fritz Coleman, is also a professional stand-up comic whose gig on “The Tonight Show” last month was hyped on his own newscast that night with clips of his taped performance. Good jokes, maybe, but bad news judgment.

Comedian Coleman is scheduled to make a return visit to “The Tonight Show” Tuesday, and weatherman Coleman is now being promoted by KNBC on 500 billboards across five counties.

KNBC’s new weekend weathercaster, by the way, is Christopher Nance, a former comedian. He may not be ready for Johnny Carson yet, but there’s always Merv.

How times have changed. Bill Yearout was the funky weathercaster in Kansas City when I was a kid there in the late 1950s. His gimmick was to go behind a transparent weather board and write the forecast backward so that viewers on the other side could read it correctly. He would add that everyone talks about the weather, but no one does anything about it--”year in and Yearout.”

Pretty bad. But at least he never wore a baseball cap.