Colm O'Regan: Johnny Sexton teaches kids a valuable lesson that people can sometimes be a bit awkward

The meet-your-heroes bit on the Toy Show is sweet. It’s a little window into the fixations of small children. Most are sports/music-mad, but there’ll also be the weather-obsessed child who loses their mind when they meet a meteorologist. 

2024’s heroes came from music, rugby, athletics and aerospace. (It sounds like it could be a degree course in UCC. Forget STEM – MARA is where it’s at.)

Johnny Sexton came on and treated it like any game. He played what was in front of him. Took no risks, and only when the points were on the board, cut loose a little. He was admirably frank about delaying retirement and life after retirement.

Now some people might think that him saying, “I will miss that buzz [of playing] until the day I die” is not Toy Show.

I disagree. It’s never too early for children to learn that careers aren’t linear, that adults find transition hard.

Maybe they’ll understand their own parents a little better when they realise they might be getting too old for astro five-aside and reluctantly call it a day, to use a completely hypothetical example.

When asked for advice for the young lad, Johnny wasted no syllables.

“Listen to your coaches, work hard. I learned how to listen later in my career. I wasn’t always very good at it.” 

If you were booking him for a corporate event you’d have to pay a substantial fee to get that essential message for your employees. 

The child is getting it for now. When he’s deposing Elon Musk as head of MarsTerraform in 30 years time, he’ll trace it back to the Toy Show.

And even if the child took nothing else from it, apart from free football boots, he’ll learn another valuable lesson: People -even famous talented ones- can sometimes be a bit awkward with strangers. And children are totally ok with awkwardness. They don’t even notice pauses.

It’s we the viewer who have the biggest problem with awkward. We fear ‘cringe’. Cringe is one of those feelings that is enhanced by everyone telling you how cringey it was. We hate dead air. So much of what we consume is edited to within an inch of its life. 

Comedy clips have every gnat’s hair-width of gaps taken out. Most chat shows are pre-recorded. The Late Late at least still gives us the possibility of awkward. 

But I think we used to be better able to deal with it. Look at YouTube clips of chat shows here from the 70s and 80s. You could play an ad in some of the silences as some taciturn actor takes a long drag of a cigarette, a measured slurp of whiskey and fixes the host with a withering glare. 

Watch Tom Waits and his wife being interviewed by Gay Byrne in 1981. It seems almost unwatchable to 21st century eyes. The pauses are not only pregnant, they’ve given birth to other pauses.

But I think we just watched it and moved on and didn’t endlessly analyse for cringe.

The Toy Show child meeting their hero this year didn’t cringe. The man they worshipped was right there! With free football boots. The child was in awe. Agog.

So why not just let the awkward wash over you? Wallow in it. Lots of things in life are hard and you’ve no control over them. But cringe is up to you.