The Late Late Toy Showoff
Grandad December 1st, 2007
“Anything on tonight?” says I.
“Only the Toy Show” says Herself.
“Jayzus!” says I “you’re not going to watch that sh*te, are you?”
“It might be a laugh” says Herself.
She was right.
To those of you who don’t know him, Pat ‘The Plank’ Kenny is an experiment that went horribly wrong. At some stage in the past, they tried to clone an android and a human, and they failed abysmally. The Plank is the result. This goes some way to explaining how Plank doesn’t understand children because he never was a child himself. To him, children are horrible little irritations who keep trying to steal his limelight.
Plank is madly in love with himself. He has sex on a very regular basis. In fact, he has sex every time he passes a mirror, or other reflective surface. That’s why you rarely see him out and about. He knows he wouldn’t be able to resist a quick whack-off if he caught sight of himself in a shop window. I don’t think he has ever had sex with anyone else though.
And this is the bloke they put in a studio with dozens of children for over two hours, on live television.
It is a recipe for disaster, and it was.
On a cringe scale of one to ten, the programme started off at around twelve and went downhill from there.
Herself and I kept a tally through the programme. We kept score of how much we estimated each toy would cost [it averaged at around €200], how long it would last before boredom set in [average, 5 minutes] and how long parents would have to take to pay off the moneylenders after their rugrats had seen the programme [average, 2 years].
The toys were useless. Virtually every single one of them had a microchip and a load of batteries. Talking dogs. Singing dolls. Remote control everything.
What made the programme so enjoyable was that nothing worked. Every toy that was wheeled out failed abysmally.
The highlight of the programme was at the very beginning, when a crawling baby doll was produced. Two little girls were to demonstrate all the ‘technical features’ of the doll, so it was placed on the studio floor. It didn’t work. It just sat there immobile.
“He wouldn’t” says I
“He would” says Herself.
“He wouldn’t dare” says I.
He did.
The Plank stepped forward and whacked his size eleven boot up the baby’s hole, sending it skittering across the studio floor.
Of course there were howls of protest from the two girls. They had just seen a baby kicked in the arse. Pat couldn’t understand it. He had just seen a cheap toy being given a nudge. He tried to apologise, and blamed studio electronics.
Throughout the programme, as toy after toy failed, he blamed studio electronics, and muttered about how they had worked during rehearsals. B*ll*x. If they worked during rehearsals, they should have worked on the programme. It was just a live demonstration of the non-lifespan of the things.
The whole programme was a fiasco. It was hilarious. It was embarrassing. It was gripping stuff. I couldn’t watch, it was so bad. I couldn’t miss a minute, it was so funny.
After the Late Late, they always hold a post-mortem. In the old days, Gay Byrne used to produce a bottle and they’d celebrate the success of the program.
I’d say after last night’s post-mortem, there was blood on the walls and the ceiling.
I wish to God that someone would remove Pat The Plank’s batteries.
-oOo-
Addendum
I have just found a list of the crap that was demonstrated [and prices!!]
Another Addendum
Apparently, RTE are too embarrassed by the list. They have taken it down!!
