Why Toy Show is the best early Christmas gift we could hope for
THE fire is set already. The pyjamas are ironed. Around nine tomorrow night, I’ll light the former and put on the latter. I’ll ease the cork out of a nice bottle of red wine, and leave it breathe for half an hour – and then, as I have done pretty much every year since 1975, I’ll settle down on the couch for The Late Late Toy Show.
And, of course, I won’t be alone, because this show – well, it’s more of an institution, really – is usually the most watched of the year, and not just in Ireland. RTÉ opens up the Player to a worldwide audience; last year, the show was streamed by the diaspora in over 100 countries. A friend in Connecticut watches it every year with his sons; other friends in Toronto watch with their daughters. A family I know in Melbourne eat their breakfast all the way through it before spending the rest of their Saturday lazing by the swimming pool.
Here at home, 1.54million of us tuned in to last year’s Friday night broadcast, and hundreds of thousands more watched the Saturday repeat and the RTÉ Player catch-up stream. The runner-up in terms of the most popular broadcasts, the AllIreland senior f ootball f i nal replay between Dublin and Kerry, trailed far behind with 991,000 viewers.
Nostalgia
In fact, only one other recent TV event has topped The Late Late Toy Show’s viewership, and t hat was Leo Varadkar’s announcement of the first lockdown, in March, when 1.6million of us learned of our fate. Ironically, this second l ockdown means more of us than ever will be at home tomorrow night, and only a fool would bet against the audience topping two million, given there are no other distractions to lure us from the couch.
The recent success of the Toy Show has largely been down to nostalgia, as parents (and even grandparents) who grew up with it now watch with children of their own. This year, though, there will be something else in pl ay, s omething t hat has manifested itself ever since the pandemic began.
Nostalgia has become a powerful presence in our lives, because we have had time to think about the things we did when we were younger, the simpler pleasures we enjoyed when everything was relatively uncomplicated.
At no stage was the national bread supply ever threatened in the way it has been during winter storms and freezes, yet many t urned to baking during lockdown because it brought comfort to remember how things used to be done.
Crafts and games were revived. I have friends who started knitting again. Others bought colouring books. I ordered a 1,000piece jigsaw online, and I haven’t done one of those for over 40 years. And, of course, there were the ubiquitous quizzes held on Zoom with family members in all parts of the world rediscovering the competitive streak missing for 20 years, since back when we all wanted to beat each other at Trivial Pursuit.
Both my parents are sadly no longer with us, but the Toy Show reminds me of their presence. As a family, we sat down to watch it together, and while I wasn’t exactly a child when it started in 1975 – I was 12, actually – and Santa called only to my younger sister, I still got a present out of it by casually (well, calculatedly) remarking on how much I loved a car racing track with a loop, which duly arrived in wrapping paper on Christmas Day.
How many parents, I wonder, still use it as a chance to get their children that dream gift?
Do they see a child’s eyes light up and know, in that instant, that their dilemma about what to buy is over? I suspect they do, because we all know of the rush to toy shops the next day, and frequently hear how a featured toy can sell out within days.
And, of course, we love the children themselves, the singers, the dancers, the delightful eccentrics like junior horologist John Joe, and the girl surprised by Ed Sheeran, and the brother and sister Adam and Kayla Burke who, in the most heart-warming moment of recent years, were surprised when their soldier f ather Graham, whom they thought was in Mali on UN duty, hopped out of a box to hug them. The wine might have played a small role in my reaction to that, but you’d want to have a heart of stone if you didn’t shed a tear of joy for all of them.
Sadly, there will not be any inperson reunions this year. Travel restrictions will have put paid to such plans, but no doubt the technology we have all relied on this year to keep us connected will again ensure there are plenty more surprises to keep us all reaching for a Kleenex.
And, in his 12th year at the helm, Ryan Tubridy will use all his manic energy – he’s basically
Ireland’s biggest kid himself – to act as ringmaster in our favourite annual circus.
As it happens, my younger sister and I are in a support bubble, the single greatest improvement to quality of life in this second lockdown, and she’ll be on the couch and I’ll be in the armchair with the footstool, and we’ll laugh and we’ll cry as we have done for decades now.
Reunions
Amusingly, when she was here last year, there was an ad in one of the breaks that was set in Paris and she remarked – casually, I’m sure, and not calculatedly! – that she hadn’t been since she was a teenager. Her birthday is in January, so next day I booked tickets for both of us to go as a combined birthday and Christmas gift, and was reminded once again of that racetrack with the loop and how a seed planted in my parents’ heads also bore fruit. I’m so glad she said it, because in this strangest of years, it turned out to be my only foreign holiday; weeks later, our lives changed in a way we never could have foreseen.
And that’s why, this year more than any other, we need The Late Late Toy Show. This is a night for the entire Irish family, all of us from Belfast to Bantry, Cricklewood to Coventry, the Bronx to Boston, Auckland to Adelaide, to celebrate together and, yes, to hope that those reunions we love to watch will, sooner rather than later, have a starring role for ourselves.