In a backstage area at RTÉ, Ryan Tubridy is driving a tiny red Vespa surrounded by a half-dozen children on bikes, scooters, plastic tractors and roller skates and one Irish Times journalist on a tiny electric fire engine. That’s me. I don’t know how to stop and I’m frightened I’m going to collide with a child. Some children are yelling with joy. Some have furrowed brows of concentration. Many of the toys have prerecorded sounds – sirens, engines, car horns. “Out of my way!” cries Tubridy, terrifyingly.
It’s a rehearsal for The Late Late Toy Show’s ride-on, my favourite bit of the Toy Show, the Soviet-like demonstration of infant power in which a procession of children drive solemnly across the Late Late Show studio and Tubridy looks on like a proud autocrat.
Before Tubridy arrives the Toy Show producer Neasa McLaughlin shows me the various vehicles all lined up neatly for use, and introduces me to a nurse, Aoife, who is there lest any child come a cropper. She’s been there for much of the week, including at a Toy Show-related shoot the night before. She has, I’m told, a “big bag of drugs”.
“Just Benylin!” says Aoife.
“At one point I was so stressed I said to her, ‘Just take my blood pressure,’” says McLaughlin.
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McLaughlin has been working on this year’s Toy Show since September, though often the ideas come even earlier. “The running joke is that the show finishes and we sit around having a beer and say, ‘What do you think would work for the theme next year?’”
It’s the most viewed show on RTÉ: 1.56 million people watched last year’s show live, 81 per cent of the available audience. And everything about it is under a strict veil of secrecy. While most of the RTÉ teams, including the week-to-week version of the Late Late team, exist together in a big open-plan office, the Toy Show team are hived away from early September in a room with a closed door. “Every year at the first meeting we’re, like, ‘Let’s not be the ones who killed the Toy Show,’” she says.
I sign a nondisclosure agreement before being able to sit in on some of the behind-the-scenes preparations so that I don’t ruin Christmas. I sit in on a production meeting, I’m shown models of the set, and I see bits of performance numbers, but I can’t mention any of the details. I see a model of a [redacted]. I see Tubridy dressed as a [redacted] inside a [redacted]. I see a child dressed as a [redacted] and another dressed as a [redacted]. I listen to production staff discuss how one of the biggest challenges was the [redacted] which will be [redacted] from the [redacted].
‘I’d be sent a backing track, and I sing along in my car or in my kitchen, singing full throttle. If I’m going to do it, do it. So I need to embrace it and inhabit the creature I need to be’
— Ryan Tubridy
When I arrive at RTÉ, Tubridy, clad in a jumper covered with Atari-style Santas, brings me to me to see his previous Toy Show costumes, which are in a corridor that leads to the costume department and is lined with pictures of Tubridy on set. “A gallery of horrors,” he says. “The scary part of Madame Tussauds… I had it written into my contract there be pictures of me everywhere. Like North Korea.”
He’s done 13 Toy Shows now, so there are Lion King-themed costumes, Frozen-themed costumes, a Chitty Chitty Bang Bang-themed costume, a Mary Poppins-themed costume and a Fantastic Mr Fox-themed costume, which is really a velvet suit with a tail and ears. “I liked that outfit. You could wear that.” A pause. “If you were Franz Ferdinand.”
How is he with doing song-and-dance numbers? “I’d be sent a backing track, and I sing along in my car or in my kitchen, singing full throttle. If I’m going to do it, do it. So I need to embrace it and inhabit the creature I need to be.”
We go down into the bowels of the costume department, where there’s a rack of Christmas jumpers. “Putting on the Christmas jumper is like putting the armour on to get into battle.” He goes through them, passing over one featuring He-Man and Skeletor and another featuring Captain Picard, though he whistles the Star Trek theme as we stroll out of the room.
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It’s a very full-on part of the year for Tubridy, coping with his radio show, the regular Late Late and then, brewing in the background, the Toy Show. “The only thing is the payoff: you got handsomely elected with 81 per cent of population, like a tinpot dictator.”
A little away from everything else in RTÉ, in an unassuming-looking Portakabin, two toy testers, Andrew McDermott and Sinead McMullen, have spent several months sifting through acres of toys. The window of the Portakabin is obscured by stuffed toys and a handwritten sign that just says “Help!” “It stops people staring in like we’re in a goldfish bowl,” says McDermott.
Lots of the selection has been done. A nearby gym has been requisitioned to fill with the overflow toys. A lone punching bag sits in there among the garish boxes. Here in the Portakabin the chaos has been organised on to tables for the specific children who are due to appear on the show. They’ll be sent these toys the week before the programme.
Tubridy is drawn first to a yellow-beaked crow puppet that he sticks on his arm and begins to operate. “CAW!” says the crow.
“CAW! CAW! CAW! CAW!” says the crow into McMullen’s ear.
“It’s really annoying,” says McMullen.
“I do love puppets,” says Tubridy.
‘We took over a library when we did the Fantastic Mr Fox. It has to be fun making it, because if it’s not fun making it, it’s definitely not going to be fun watching it’
— Marcella Power
Tubridy tries some more puppets. There’s one that has a long neck. “The neck on you,” says Tubridy.
There’s one you can stick your hands into it so it has creepily human-like hands. “I love it… ‘I am not a crook’,” he says, making the doll do the V-for-victory sign like Richard Nixon.
As well as matching toys to the individual children, McMullen and McDermott also have to match them to Tubridy, who vetoes the ones he finds boring or finicky. “I have two or three notebooks with ideas,” says McDermott. “We live in this cabin for 2½ months. Us, two chairs and two space heaters.”
Tubridy wanders from toy to toy. He fires balls at me using a sort of unicorn gun. He picks up the receiver of a classic Fisher Price phone and says “Hello” before handing it to McMullen. “I think it’s for you.”
He gives me one end of a Darth Vader stretching toy and urges me to stretch it. “Use the force!” he advises.
He begins manhandling a Play-Doh-filled ice-cream maker. “Are you trying to break it?” asks McLaughlin.
“Things breaking is a tradition on the Toy Show,” says Tubridy.
And then he’s back on the crow. He really loves that crow. “CAW!” CAW! CAW!” says the crow.
“I just love that they gave him just that one sound,” says Tubridy. “I think I’ll call him Russell. Russell Crow.”
On the Tuesday night the team filmed a dance number outside based on the song [redacted] with 25 dancing and singing children dressed as [redacted]. I’m shown some footage of the dance number as well as footage of Tubridy leaping on to an out-of-shot mattress, so that it looks as though he’s flying through the air. Next door in a workshop we find the production designer Marcella Power cleaning fake snow off some of the electrical equipment because she doesn’t want things shorting out during the actual show.
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“I’ve been here 31 years,” she says. “I’ve done the Toy Show for Gay Byrne.”
It was a smaller production then, just a bunch of toys on a set off to the side. Now there are themes and big production numbers, and Power is instrumental in designing it all. “We’ve already done four shoots for this one,” she says.
The show is steered by the Something Happens bassist turned Late Late Show director Alan Byrne. “When I was doing it originally, when Pat [Kenny] was there, it was a one-day thing,” he says. “And then we started to expand the openings, and they went from a song in the studio to small films. That’s where the fun is as a director… Can we make it snow? Yeah, of course we can…. Other years we built a submarine; we took over a library when we did the Fantastic Mr Fox… It has to be fun making it, because if it’s not fun making it, it’s definitely not going to be fun watching it.”
In the Late Late Show studio, Power talks us through where everything is going to go on the week of the actual show. That week the team will spend very long days in the studio installing and dressing the set. “At that stage, you get silly... One time we were dressing toys and this toy started laughing and we all broke our hearts laughing.”
Is it nerve-racking? “It’s always a bit scary, but it’s fun,” she says. “Is it fun?” she asks herself. “Yeah,” she concludes. “It’s fun.”
The first kids to arrive for the ride-on practice are seven-year-old year old Amelia and her brother, four-year-old Cathal, who have come with their mam, Alva, from Galway.
“We’re very organised this year,” says “OG Toy Show researcher” Clare McQuaid. The kids are scheduled to arrive every 15 minutes.
Amelia is in a pink dress. Cathal is wearing skinny blue jeans and sensible brown brogues. “Those are Ryan Tubridy shoes,” says McQuaid. “He wanted shoes like Ryan Tubridy and trousers like Ryan Tubridy.”
“She’s so excited and he doesn’t really know what’s going on,” says Alva.
“For all The Late Late Toy Shows I stayed up all night,” says Amelia, who now has a unicorn-horned bike helmet on her head.
“There’s almost a competition at school to see who can stay awake for the whole show,” says Alva.
Picking children for the show is very difficult, says McQuaid. “We watch over 3,000 videos… If you get a call to come to audition we’ve seen something special I can’t even put words on.”
‘It’s a run. I’m running for mayor, mayor of Crazy Town. I’m hoping to get elected’
— Ryan Tubridy
“I describe them as ‘Come here to mes,’” says McLaughlin. “A kid that would go to Ryan, ‘Come here to me and I’ll tell you.’”
“Something comes up and it just jumps out,” says Rania Atamna, a researcher, “like Adam last year… They pop up on screen and you go, ‘Oh wow… Stop everything and look at this kid.’”
“Sometimes you get so invested and you fight for ‘your’ kid,” says McLaughlin. “There might be only one spot but there’s three brilliant kids.”
The typical Irish approach to celebrity is to try to look unimpressed. Children have not learned that knack around Tubridy. When he arrives in the room, Amelia and Cathal’s eyes widen and they stop talking.
“What age are you?” Tubridy says to Cathal.
“Four.”
“Forty-seven,” says Tubridy.
“No! Four!” says Cathal.
“Forty,” says Tubridy.
“Four! Four!” says Cathal
“Forty-four,” says Tubridy.
“Four!” says Cathal.
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He looks at the Vespas that the Toy Show staff are pushing on Amelia and Cathal and decides to upend their plans.
“Did you choose this beautiful Vespa or did they choose it for you?” he says.
“They choose it for me,” says Amelia.
“Get off that thing!” says Tubridy. “What would you like to go on? This is your day!”
“This one!” says Cathal of a sort of electronic tractor/digger that makes an interminable beeping sound.
As Amelia and Cathal clamber aboard the loud, bright toys of their choice, another child, eight-year-old Kate, arrives with her mother, Kitty. “Freckles!” says Tubridy to Kate, who laughs. “Is that your mother? She looks terrified.”
“I’m in awe here,” says Kitty. “I think I’m even more excited than Kate. It’s a big deal.”
Does she watch the Toy Show every year?
“She watches the Toy Show all the year round,” says Kitty.
“I watch it in October,” says Kate.
They’ve been through a lot. Kate was friends with the children who died tragically in Tallaght in September. “It’s been a hard few months,” says Kitty. “This is something to look forward to with all the trauma we had.”
Cathal drives by on the digger, with a very serious expression on his face. (“He looks like he’ll be driving to Galway in it,” says one of the researchers.) Kate goes by on a bike that’s probably too big for her. Tubridy drives past on one of the Vespas discarded by Amelia and Cathal. “That was my plan all along,” he says.
“He’s a big child, isn’t he?” says Kitty.
“We used to bring in 35 kids all at the same time,” says McLaughlin. “Can you imagine that?”
More children and vehicles are added to the mix. Soon I’m on the fire truck. “Call the fire brigade!” says Tubridy from his Vespa.
Has he any words that sum up this time of year for him? “It’s a run. I’m running for mayor, mayor of Crazy Town. I’m hoping to get elected.”
The Late Late Toy Show is on on RTÉ One and RTÉ Player on Friday, November 25th, at 9.35pm
