RTÉ must do less, but better and cheaper
WHAT were they thinking? That the first question that springs to mind when it comes to Toy Show The Musical, RTÉ’s ill-fated attempt to muscle in on the lucrative Christmas live show market in late 2022.
The Late Late Toy Show itself is a national institution, firing the starting gun, as it does every last Friday in November, on the entire festive season. It is a pleasure enjoyed at home, often with the entire family, adults and children alike, sitting in front of the fire with minerals and sweets and s’mores, and maybe a sneaky bottle of Cabernet Sauvignon hidden behind an armchair so that Mum and Dad don’t entirely lose the will to live as the marathon unfolds and the children start to nod off.
Traumatised
Just because it is a national institution, though, does not mean it would easily translate into a stage show, and certainly not one that, inexplicably, pivots on the story of Nell Mooney, a young girl facing into her first Christmas after the death of her mother. Hands up, I didn’t see it, but as a child utterly traumatised by the death of Bambi’s mother, I can’t imagine my young self being overjoyed watching a show with a mum-shaped hole at its centre.
The fact that I didn’t see it does, however, gives me a lot in common with just about the entire country because, equally inexplicably, RTÉ booked the 1,995-seat auditorium in the National Convention Centre in Dublin’s Docklands in which to stage it.
That venue is more usually in service for professional gatherings, awards shows, a concert for the late Queen Elizabeth II, various Comic Cons, X Factor auditions, and meetings of the Houses of the Oireachtas. The latter were held there from June 2020 to July 2021 in order to allow full attendance under Covid-19 restrictions, and, if nothing else came of that sojourn, we learned that the NCC was a great place to get 40 winks.
A total of 54 shows were planned for the musical, with the plan being to sell 75,000 tickets. Alas, Covid was still in the air then as it is now, and with many of the cast becoming infected over the course of the show’s run, only 27 performances took place.
The result was financial carnage. In total, just over 20,000 people saw Toy Show The Musical, and only 11,044 of them paid for tickets at an average cost of €46.50.
Another 5,500 tickets were given to guests, while 3,500 more went in competition prizes – there was, you might remember, a lot of promotion for the show. And what that led to is a quite staggering example of the cost of hubris.
RTÉ must have assumed that, because the Toy Show itself is a ratings winner, anything ancillary to that must be a sure-fire hit too. It spent €658,500 on set-up costs, €622,016 on running costs, €339,634 on marketing costs, and other sums that brought Montrose’s total loss on the project to a whopping €2.2million.
It is a fine example of how you probably shouldn’t get into a business with which you’re not familiar. The Gaiety has run pantos for a century, and Alan Hughes and Karl Broderick have made their own shows a Dublin institution too, so they know the ropes (literally, if you’re lowering a glittering carriage from the roof, or raising a giant beanstalk).
The creative team behind the RTÉ musical had worked on the actual Toy Show, but in retrospect, and despite the presence of the hugely experienced Julian Erskine of Riverdance renown as a consultant producer, more seasoned hands might have been needed to oversee the project.
At the end of the day, though, this is not a personal failure, of the producers, writers, cast or crew, but an institutional one, and for one very simple reason: the RTÉ board never approved it in the first place.
Today’s Grant Thornton report into the debacle is a damning indictment of what we have known since last June, namely that Montrose has been run for years on a sense of entitlement, behind Chinese walls.
So many employees have since appeared before Oireachtas committees claiming that they never knew about various practices such as the infamous barter accounts used to buy flights to rugby matches and upmarket sandals for favoured advertisers, you’d have to wonder why RTÉ had a board at all.
Massive
More to the point, you also have to wonder if anything has been learned. Despite a massive shortfall in the licence fee when many stopped paying it because of what they saw as inflated star salaries and solo runs such as Toy Show The Musical, RTÉ has pressed on regardless with a schedule that looks very similar to what has gone before.
Despite the recruitment freeze announced by new director general Kevin Bakhurst, this week alone we saw Oliver Callan hired at €150,000 a year to host the 9am slot on RTÉ Radio 1.
Full declaration here, I’ve known Oliver for years and like him very much, and I think he’s a talented broadcaster, so it’s nothing personal – but the optics of the appointment suggest the very opposite of what Bakhurst set out as his mission.
RTÉ now needs to concentrate on doing less, and doing it better and cheaper. Hard questions have to be asked. Does it really still need The Late Late Show at all? Does it need to invest so heavily in drama when the series everyone talks about are on the multinational streaming services?
These are existential questions, and they have to be asked. One of them, though, has only one answer. If anyone ever again suggests staging a musical, there’s only one answer – ‘mother of the divine, no!’