The Late Late Toy Show, The Wireless and Wonderful Memories

 

Tomorrow night, a nation stops for one of the strangest nights in Irish television, which is often hard to explain to an outsider. In a year when we spent much of it under restrictions due to the pandemic, the Late Late Toy Show on RTE brings a much-needed respite, for the child in all of us. The cares of our world suspended for a couple of hours of joy and mayhem. We are transported back, willingly to our own innocent childhoods. The hashtag #latelateshowtoyshow will trend internationally, and there will surely at least one moment that will be a YouTube sensation. The ‘Late Late Toy Show’ has become both an institution, from the days of its creator Gay Byrne, to the ratings winner for the national broadcaster it is today.

 

But the Late Late Show and its broadcast this Friday night brought back memories to me of the first time I fell in love with radio. It was the late sixties and there was a wooden encased Bush radio, sitting on a homemade shelf in the kitchen just out of reach of myself and my younger sister. It was one of those sets that had to warm up before any sound broke through the mesh at the front or the light behind the glass paneled dial shone, coming seemingly from a magical place called ‘Athlone’. I was four or five years old and Christmas Eve was still full of wonderment and excitement.

 We duly wrote our letters to Santa Claus but what I asked for is lost on the fogs of time but I do remember one of the first toys I asked for was a Meccano set. There was an iron bathtub that would be perched on two chairs in the kitchen, filled with water boiled in pots on the range. A bar of yellow sunlight soap used to scrub us daredevils. We would have our baths but it was annually timed to coincide with Radio Eireann’s ‘Lucky Dip, Letters to Santa’, which was broadcast on a Christmas Eve in the late afternoon. The screams of us pleading for the adults to be quiet as we listened hoping against hope that our letter was read out, ensuring that we would be getting our presents and hopefully ’the surprise’.

There was one radio in the house and one 405 line black and white TV but we never had control, until we got that little bit older, until I was able to stand on a chair in the kitchen and reach those tuning knobs and discovered another world, the global world of radio. Radio and Santa helped inject a passion in radio broadcasting that lasted longer than any of the presents Santa left beneath our Christmas tree. Alas never once was our letter read out. (Children look away now. It would have been difficult for our letters to be read out because at times our mam and dad did not send them as perhaps our requests were a little outlandish and probably too expensive. Finding the letters in my grandmothers’ drawers (no not those ones) left me with that crest fallen feeling. I have been lied to, hoodwinked yet I was never left wanting and Santa came every year filling me with happiness. I had been a good boy.)

 

I, as the oldest was bathed first and then I was made sit on a small chair, that my mother had inherited herself (it’s still around the house), in front of a blackened range of the bottom of the kitchen, to warm up and dry off.

 

I remember one year, as Mam and my Gran carried out the tradition of getting us cleaned up for Santa’s visit and off course a visit to Mass the next day, not everything went to a yuletide plan. Here we were listening to a programme that was actually aimed at us chislers and we were heavily invested in listening to it on the wireless but immediately after it ended there was some murmurs of consternation as Radio Eireann dared to broadcast a carol service from St. Patrick’s Cathedral.  We were hunted straight away out of the kitchen up to the sitting room, there was no room my grandmother said for ‘those sorts of broadcasts in this house’. A Protestant service, with some beautiful singing, was not for our young Catholic ears. As we scarpered up the stairs, we could hear the dial moving swiftly along the waveband for the dulcet tones of Radio Luxembourg.

 

They were magical times, great memories and I remember the joy of listening to the radio, not fully understanding the magic and ingenuity that brought those broadcasts into our kitchen through the ether. I love radio, listening to it, understanding it, and now writing about it.