As Storm Darragh shakes Ireland like a snow globe, the Late Late Toy Show (RTÉ One, 9.35pm) opens to the strains of Brenda Lee’s Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree and a dance number featuring swaying snowmen and gyrating dust-bins.
It’s a classic Toy Show start: a riot of festive cheer featuring chirruping children, audience members in Christmas hats clapping along in nervous enthusiasm, and presenter Patrick Kielty fuelled by enough raw adrenaline to power Santa’s reindeer.
“Tonight it’s all about the magic of Christmas,” says Kielty when he finally calms down long enough to get a few words out. “I have been left home alone with this studio audience.”
Home Alone? As in the 1990s slapstick classic in which Macaulay Culkin plays an abandoned child forced into increasingly extreme measures to keep intruders at bay? That is indeed the theme of a special that kicks off with a pre-recorded segment at Dublin Airport where a swarm of children board a plane and then shout, “Patrick!” Cut to Kielty sliding down tinsel-bedecked stairs just as Culkin did on the big screen.
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The nostalgic appeal of the film is understandable, though there is the obvious logical gap to paying tribute to a movie about the hilarious side of home invasion. Considering RTÉ's wonky financial state, it is difficult, after all, to imagine any burglar going to the trouble of breaking into Montrose.
Blow open the safe in the basement, and all that you will find is an old Ryan Tubridy Christmas jumper and the password to Joe Duffy’s computer. Still, just like Culkin’s Kevin coasting down those steps before maiming Joe Pesci for life, Kielty gets stuck in enthusiastically. First up, a natter with Dory from Tallaght in Dublin, who wants to be a vet when she grows up, followed by an appearance by pop star Jazzy - much to Dory’s delight.
Kielty is a steady presence – maniacal when he needs to be, calm as required. He doesn’t have the jack-in-a-box, hamster-on-Red Bull energy that defined the Tubridy Toy Show Years, but that is perhaps not a bad thing. Though clocking in at nearly 150 minutes, the evening never feels like too much. That sense you got from broadcasts’ past of being force-fed marzipan by a boggle-eyed toy-master has been replaced by something calmer, easier on the eyeballs and kinder to the soul.
Still, there is some harking back to Toy Show tradition. “Queen of Christmas” Mariah Carey pops up in a video at the end to wish everyone well. Rugby star Johnny Sexton arrives, dampening the mood somewhat by explaining retirement is a bummer. Olympians Sharlene Mawdsley and Phil Healy help with a trolley dash around a toy store. And Doctor Norah Patton, hoping to be the first Irish person in space, emerges from a cardboard space shuttle to banter with interstellar enthusiasts Zara and Cillian.
History is made, too, with the first “All-Ireland” Toy Show parade, involving kids driving miniature JCBs and pulling cartwheels while Kielty uncorks his best Mícheál Ó Muircheartaigh impersonation.
In Kielty’s second Toy Show, the strategy is to go big. Some 250 kids – from toy testers to dancing Munchkins – are involved, up from the already significant 170 in 2023. Then there’s the bumper running time, stretching from after the Nine O’Clock News to just past midnight. That’s quite a marathon which asks a lot of the viewer and even more of Kielty. Preparation for the Toy Show has been underway since summer. “The work has started months ago on the Toy Show. Come 9.35 on the sixth of December, I would say at least 50 per cent of that preparation will go out the window because kids will be added,” Kielty said recently. “What you think is going to happen and what you think you are planning to do will probably change for the better – and maybe sometimes the worse.”
But there are no disasters as Toy Show 2024 reaches the finish line with a group performance of Carey’s All I Want For Christmas Is You. He’s head-first into the action – tinsel in a twist yet with a reassuring sense of having everything under control. That is surely just an illusion, and it could all capsize at any moment. But as a cast of hundreds joins in, Kielty’s Home Alone homage is a slice of Kevin on Earth.
