The economic disaster that turned George Lee into a celebrity
RTE
George Lee: what's that they say about clouds and silver linings?
Saturday October 04 2008
National upheaval gives birth to celebrities. Amid the sweating and heaving of the last general election, Ivan Yates was squeezed out, all pink and healthy and roaring. Since then he's grown into a thriving commentator and all-round talking head.
Slightly more than nine months later, the pain and exhaustion of global financial meltdown has produced eight healthy pounds of economic celebrity in the form of George Lee.
It was a long gestation and a major transformation for George. His role had once been simple: he did the boring economic reporting for RTE, standing in the cold on New Year's Day to tell us how the Central Bank was giving coffee to people swapping their punts for euros, or putting his best suit on to talk non-resident accounts on PrimeTime.
George approached every report and interview with the professional, if dull, functionality of the average economic correspondent. The first major change in him came when he began to try to force life and excitement into his subject matter. He intoned over endowment mortgages, and fretted over coming cataclysm with his 'Future Shock' analysis of peak oil.
But no matter how much adrenalin he forced into the veins of his items, they were always too obscure or affected too narrow a group of people to make George's name any more than an ever-present expert with an air of hushed foreboding.
So, like a wise economist, he diversified. He started doing semi-social reports on China and used Tubridy's radio show to nibble into David McWilliams territory in the public mind. It was during these appearances that it became clear that George had moved head down and was ready to be delivered for an expectant nation.
Then the economy took its nose-dive down the toilet and labour began. George became a staple on Six One News, the RTE News: Nine O'Clock and Morning Ireland, swapping artificial enthusiasm for gravitas.
The shift in perception was subtle but important; his Tubridy Show comment had moved him from straight reporter into interesting commentator. His reports included more and more of his views and analysis and less and less dead data. That analysis nudged him more and more into McWilliams land, with conference organisers now willing to pay the big bucks for him to address their audiences.
And just as he was crowing, the entire financial system collapsed and George burst forth. And arrived with a delight that was at slight odds with the crisis on which he was reporting. He appeared on every broadcast with the joy of a man who finds himself with a brief that is normally boring, but suddenly he became central to the lives of everyone in the nation.
Like a farming correspondent overjoyed to have foot-and-mouth to play with, George's reports looked as if he was always thinking 'thank God for this. It beats the hell out of GDP assessment'.
And with his delight, the reports and analysis grew in both length and confidence. Appearing on Six One News, he gave up on the sham format of question-and-answer and delivered detailed and thoughtful monologues, pausing only occasionally to let the director remind us with a cut-away that Anne Doyle hadn't gone home.
His dissertation on the Government's bank bailout finished with a nod and the slightest of smiles. The smile of a man who knows he is being watched, listened to and is performing beautifully.
It was astonishing that David McWilliams managed to make economics accessible and interesting to the people. It is more astonishing that a man operating within the tight confines of RTE's economics editorship could not only build on that accessibility, but do it by combining social commentary, reportage and analysis. So that now, it is not George Lee's reports the nation waits for, but rather George Lee's views.
- Anton Savage
