The Late Late Toy Show is a microcosm of Irish life told through the eyes of a man-child high on a buzzy cocktail of Fanta and Centrum. Ryan Tubridy trips and skids about like a newborn giraffe in a bright jumper, reminiscing to children as though a Werther's Original advert stumbled into Snapchat land.
Like every Irish leader, he presides over a world where few of his promises of high-tech wonderment materialise. Nothing works and so is tossed aside, with everything blamed on unspecified “technicalities”. No one is fired. If anyone complains, the human Sodastream creates a diversion by forcing kids to sing songs from 1950s movies not even their parents recall.
The audience are like public sector unions, wearing faux beards and that mad look of 2006 on their faces. They have the glow of lunchtime booze and no intention of leaving their keenly rewarded positions.
Most of them are the children of past Toy Show audiences and their children will occupy those same seats in the future when the spawn of Dáithí Ó Sé is hosting it live on RTÉ iCloud. Not even if Minister Fiscal Donohoe showed up and deployed his super soaker could he quench their lust for handouts. They'd be wiping his spittle off for days.
Negative equity
There’s the annual parade of tiny bewildered commuters wheeling around in all manner of affordable vehicles. They seem exhausted from their long trip from negative equity in the suburb of a suburb in the early Noughties. How the well provided-for public elves in the audience will laugh at their hapless efforts to achieve a better tomorrow!
Young girls then show up and rate child services out of 10. They whine about how the wonky knit-yourself-to-college set doesn't help bring down costs, like a Katherine Zappone policy. All they want is Mommy who spends all her time making money for a multinational that won't pay taxes to help fund decent services like a creche that won't end up on Primetime.
Just as everyone is starting to feel low, enter the micro-Healy-Rae. The hilarious nipper was reared by donkeys in a ploughing cult where he washed up on a bale of silage during a Roscommon flood. He loves toys that are fossil-fuel heavy and has cute dreams of rearing many methane-rich Friesians.
Although he's wearing brand new wellingtons and can moonwalk suspiciously well for someone who claims to have no proper broadband, he moans about "Mickey Mouse" money coming from Europe. Everyone laughs and he gets away with it for another year.
His party piece is to beat up a child who adores the Happy Pear vegans with a solar panel while singing Garth Brooks ballads on a burning John Deere. Tubs inhales the fumes, frowns and lowers his tone pointedly, because it's time to coo over a child who's been failed by the health service. You can hear the creaks of the unions shifting uncomfortably in their seats. They're holding their free things more tightly now.
To everyone's relief, the cameras cut to 10-year-olds dressed as love-hungry divorcees on late-night Harcourt Street. Nothing washes away mental images of hospitals quite like a Taylor Swift cover by tiny people with diminishing Mullingar accents.
Sob story
Next up is the item that touches on the year’s big fad. It’s an online board game where players pretend to be celebs hoping to boost social media followers by confessing some form of mental illness. If your sob story is gloomy enough, you win bonus
Sindo
headlines. The winner gets a book deal, a year of criticism-free publicity and an after-dinner circuit. The “Game of Strife” is endorsed by 1,347 celebrities. The child mutters an inaudible disclaimer how it won’t actually help ordinary folks.
We move onto another musical number. This is the token left-wing act, hoping to showcase benefits of inward migration with an immigrant child doing a pitch-perfect rendition of a Disney song, hinting that Ireland might one day reclaim Eurovision.
The emigrants are represented too. A clumsy camera sweep pans wildly at the ground and then settles eerily on an empty space stage right. For a brief moment we see the void left by broken children who've long departed TV for a better life on Minecraft and Netflix.
Then comes the kids with books. This is the slot where the smart children, the experts let's call them, come in with their high notions and talk down to the ordinary decent Lego-building, Barbie-rearing kids. The latter are sick of this elite lot with their meddling laws like printing "this is not a toy" on every piece of fun plastic. Tubs hurries the experts along so quickly, it's the equivalent of those Lidl checkout belts that let you load on two years of groceries but only give you six seconds to pack them on an area the size of a saucer.
Then the finale, as the diverse group of immigrants, farmers, liberals, hippies and tiny Tories get together to sing so badly out of key, we conclude society cannot get along no matter how much tinsel is used to bind it.
When it’s all over and no one is looking, they invite in vulture funds to purchase and break-up the set at below-cost before flogging it for treble the price and none of the tax a week later. Tubs is reappointed for another year. The toy show, like a general election, is as Irish as it gets. The turnout will be huge, but the result will be the same.