Patrick Kielty’s first outing in hosting the Late Late Toy Show on Friday night went well with the comedian-actor averaging 1.46 viewers on RTE One, making it the country’s top rated show this year. The show yielded an audience share of 81.5 per cent, which translates as four out of every five people watching television at the time were tuned in. Last year, Ryan Tubridy’s final Late Late Toy Show recorded 1.33m viewers watching live.
Nielsen figures compiled for TAM Ireland indicate that 1.7m people watched the show over the weekend, including catch up viewing, the live audience on RTE One+1 and by watching the Sunday afternoon repeat. The show also had 550,000 streams on the RTE Player from a record-breaking 147 countries worldwide, including first-time streams from Cameroon, British Virgin Islands, Sierra Leone, Rwanda, Iraq and Afghanistan.
Kielty, who hails from Dundrum in Co Down, described the experience of presenting the Toy Show for the first time as “a forever night”. The show raised €3.6 million for the Toy Show Appeal. The top programme to date this year had been Ireland’s defeat to New Zealand in the Rugby World Cup quarter final shown on Virgin One. It was the highest ever audience – 1.38m viewers – in the 25-year history of the channel formerly known as TV3.
The Late Late Show is sponsored by PTSB.
