When you write about something like the Late Late Toy Show, and people’s enjoyment of it, you run one risk more than anything else – sounding like a crank. So, before I say another word let me make some clarifying qualifications:
First, I concede that getting annoyed over what other people enjoy is a fool’s errand and a quick way to upset yourself over nothing of importance. My own television watching today will mainly comprise the second Ashes Test Match at the Gabba in Brisbane, which puts me at odds with most of Ireland rather than the other way around.
Second, I concede that the Late Late Toy Show is harmless fun for those who do enjoy it, most especially those who watch it with their children.
Third, I concede that much of the hype around the Toy Show is driven by factors external to the home: I have for example heard of at least one Primary School this week that was hyping up kids by asking them what their parents had planned for “Toy Show Night” and asking them to do paintings and drawings of Patrick Kielty and company ahead of the big night.
Indeed, were the Toy Show simply for kids, I would not be writing this piece at all. As a child, I watched many Toy Shows and enjoyed them all. So let me be clear what I object to: I object to the fact that it’s no longer really for kids at all.
Kids don’t really need it, in fact. In the 1980’s, when I was a child, the Toy Show was a showcase for things you could never feasibly hope to obtain at any other time of the year. It underlined the fact that Christmas was special and unique and it was the one time of the year when you might get something that you had your heart set upon. By contrast, I recently asked a small person in my life what they wanted for Christmas and was told that they didn’t know, because they “already have loads of toys”.
No, it strikes me that the Late Late Toy Show is, in fact, for adults. And the purpose it serves in Ireland is not to sell us Toys, but to sell us nostalgia for our own childhoods. In fact, it’s one of the few remaining things that Irish adults of child-bearing age are culturally permitted to remain nostalgic about from their own childhoods. It is a cultural touchstone; a message that this is still the same Ireland you grew up in, not too much has changed.
Indeed, it has been the font and forefront of culture wars, over the years: Readers of my age who follow this stuff may remember the great Toy Show culture wars of the late 2010s and early teens when one of the main feminist causes du jour in Ireland was to ensure that the televised toy spectacle did not feature “gendered roles” when it came to the toys: There was outrage at the idea that girls would be depicted playing with pink barbies and boys with blue action men, because of the damage this might do to tomboyish girls or their male equivalents. That particular row stopped happening around about the time that transgender ideology popped up to teach us that girls who liked action man might be secretly boys, and vice versa.
Thus, the modern Toy Show is a strange mix of nostalgia and cultural obsessions: It must be the same, but different. It must feature the relevant quota of minority ethnic children, or differently abled children. It must feature toys that highlight the climate crisis. It must be a celebration of love, not hate. RTE, you feel, work for months on the message of The Toy Show.
But at the heart of it, it has been emptied of what made it magical in the first place: We watched it not for the dancing Billy Barry kids or whatever jumper Gay Byrne was wearing: We watched it for the toys.
Even there, the emphasis has shifted: When they bring the kids on now to “demonstrate” the toys, the emphasis is for the adults: Look how cute this child is. The Toy Show “stars” become children that adults in the nation feel to be particularly precocious, or to have the kind of funny accent for a child that adults find amusing. The children on the show are there for our entertainment, not for their own. Some media outlet will run “the ten funniest toy show reactions on social media”, because once again, it is about adults entertaining adults.
The children, these days, are not the audience of the Toy Show. They are its props.
The whole thing, like much of RTE, is a faint echo of what it once was. It should, like the Rose of Tralee and Irish aspirations to win the Eurovision and that old Italia 90’ shirt you’re still keeping in the closet because it fit you when you were 9 years old, be allowed to die a quiet and dignified death.