As he prepares for his second Late Late Christmas extravaganza, Patrick Kielty says he feels more in control this year ... just about.
A safer pair of hands than this time last year he may be, but Patrick Kielty says the wintertime ‘All-Ireland final’ that is the Toy Show can still come off the rails at any moment.
The Late Late Show host is relaxed ahead of his second Toy Show this Friday — and ‘not half as sick of talking about it’ as in 2023, when he says people were ‘trying to work out whether I could do it or not’.
There was a ‘thing that used to happen in RTÉ’ last year, the comedian and presenter tells us, where people kept asking how he felt ahead of his first time hosting the 50-year-old Christmas special.
‘You really knew that what they meant was, “How am I feeling about you hosting the Toy Show?”
‘So it’s nice to be coming into it again this year knowing that you know how to drive the bus a bit, and people in the back aren’t petrified that you’re going to crash.’
But, continuing the bus metaphor, the Co. Down man cautioned: ‘Don’t get me wrong — it could very much end up in a ditch at any point, as it always can. But it feels a wee bit more under control.’
Kielty was sub goalie for the Mourne County when their minors won an All-Ireland football championship in 1987, and said the Toy Show is ‘a bit like the All-Ireland final’ in its standing in Irish life — and capacity to generate chit-chat.
‘Everybody has an opinion on it, and everybody wants to know how [it will go],’ he said.
‘“What if this happens? What if he plays? Are you going to start with this?”
‘But what’s quite nice is that I’m not the manager of the Toy Show. I’m playing in it. The kids are playing in it. So there comes a point where, no matter what system or planning the Toy Show office thinks, they blow the whistle at 25 to 10 on the sixth of December, and that’s when it’s like, “OK, what’s going to happen now?”’
The presenter stressed he is not opposed to thorough preparation and will try to execute the plan on the night, but he added: ‘A lot of the time the best moments are when the kids decide, “What plan? What are you talking about, Paddy? I’m just here to play with this.”
‘You’re looking at them going, “I thought we said in rehearsals you were going to play with that?”
‘“Well, no. Sure I’ve already played with that. Why would I want to play with that again?” There’s a wee bit of that.’
As for what input he had last year, the 53-year-old said he was keen to front a Toy Show like those when he was growing up — one with ‘kids and really cool toys’ as the main attraction, rather than spectacular musical numbers which, judging by the failure of the 2022 spin-off stage show, are not why most children love the Toy Show.
‘The one thing that I wanted at the heart of the show was that we got as many kids on as we can, and we got as many toys on as we can,’ he explained.
‘And I know that sounds really obvious, but sometimes ideas can suddenly turn into something else, and people go, “Oh, well, what if we do this? And then we could do this…”
‘And then you’re sitting going, “Hang on — when was the last time…? No, we need to get back to the kid and the toy.” So that was important for me.’
Ahead of his second stab at hosting the Toy Show, Kielty explained how it ‘nearly self-edits’ in terms of what toys make it onto our screens.
‘There’s a toy cave in RTÉ where there’ll be cool toys that you can see are trending — the thing that kids all want — so all those toys will be pulled in. Then you maybe have people who send in toys going, “I’m a toy maker. I think this toy is cool. Will you feature this?”
‘And what’s brilliant is that the production team don’t decide the toys. What happens is, we audition the kids and then the kids road test the toys. And if there’s a toy that they’re funny about and they think it’s whack, they’ll come on and go “This is rubbish. I tried to make this out of it, but I didn’t like that.”
‘More often than not, they do what kids do, and if there’s something they don’t like, it’s just really quickly put to the side and they get really quite attached to the ones that they do like, and that’s the ones that they want to talk about.’
Just the fourth person to host the Toy Show since it began in 1975, Kielty has not sought advice from its two surviving former presenters — Ryan Tubridy and Pat Kenny — reasoning: ‘I think there’s very little advice you can get on it in terms of how it works.
‘The only thing about the Toy Show that’s the same every year is the fact that it’s called a toy show, and then you have different themes, you’ve got different kids, you’ve got different toys.
‘So it’s completely different to a normal Late Late Show because if you’re hosting a normal show, and somebody is on to talk about a book or a film or something they’ve done, you have a reasonable chance that if you ask them a question about the book or the movie, they kind of might give you an answer about the book or the movie.
‘And with this, because you’re never quite sure where it’s going to go, chatting to anybody who’s done it before doesn’t really help.
‘Maybe there’s a self-help group that needs to happen for people that have hosted the Toy Show, where you’re telling each other why it hasn’t gone the way it should have gone.
‘But that’s what makes it brilliant.’
