'Hey, you know those bad-tempered, messy midgets that have started hanging around with many of our friends now that we're in our 30s?"

"Yeah?"

"Well there's a whole episode of The Late Late Show dedicated to them! It's called The Late Late Toy Show and apparently the little drunks spend all of it terrorising poor Pat!"

"No way! This I've got to see!"

Okay, The Late Late Toy Show is a gosh-darned, bona fide national institution. Things change, however. This year, for example, Pat is wearing, not the hallowed Christmas jumper of his forefather, but a cardigan/stripey shirt combo, and all of the children are clearly labelled with big-name tags so that Pat doesn't simply refer to them as "child" like a malevolent Dickensian uncle out to get their inheritance.

For those who, like me, haven't seen the show in some time, the most frightening development is how many walking, talking, mechanical toys there are: a version of Elmo who dances, a bear who reads stories, a cute doggy who barks and lies down (the clicking of the mechanics make him sound like he has arthritis like my weird cat) or a functional camera-wielding Meccano spy robot. Have none of these people seen Child's Play or its sequels (in which a doll comes to life and starts a killing spree)? Well, any children in my care will be restricted to pre-industrial toys with no mechanics or computerisation. A hoop and a stick never became sentient and murderous after a lightning storm.

I also draw the line at toys that poo (I am, of course, referring to the horrifically named "Baby Alive") toys that "teethe" ("Shoo Shoo" is a toy baby that experiences real pain, cries and grows teeth) or toys I don't understand (almost everything else). And Pat looks like he generally feels the same (although it is cute how he gets kind of excited about any science gizmos). He protects himself by covering his inoffensive child-banter with a layer of weary irony.

As he shows three-year-old Eva a toy lion cub, she notes, "I had that toy in my old house."

"Do you like him?" asks Pat hopefully.

"No," says Eva, absently, like a jaded debutante, and Pat looks tired and weary like a character from a Cormac McCarthy novel.

Sometimes he gets the last laugh. As four-year-old Seán from Co Meath drives morbidly through the studio in a 12-volt electric bulldozer with an expression that can only be described as "sullen", Pat gets his groove on. "You can see how depressed the building trade is, by the expression on his face," he says.

And later on, as Hannah Montana fan Emma explains how Miley Cyrus becomes rock star Hannah Montana by simply donning a blonde wig, and somehow manages to keep it secret from all of her friends, Pat challenges her: "Do you think you could pull that off in real life?"

"I don't know," says Emma.

"I don't think you could somehow," says Pat, bursting her young dreams and calling to mind his days as a cut-throat political journalist.

There are, of course, some typically awww-inducing moments, like when Nicky from Westlife came on with his children Jay and Rocco to visit an excited youngster out from Tallaght Hospital or when the aforementioned Emma performed a note-perfect version of 'Imagine' on guitar, and moments like this totally overshadow superstar guests like the Duchess of York and the boys from Top Gear.

At one point, however, I thought all the malfunctioning toys and missed cues had got too much for Pat. "How many turtle doves did my true love give to me?" he suddenly asked, before reaching for what I initially thought was a handgun.

"He's snapped," I said to my hoop and stick. "Hostage situation in Montrose!"

But it was just the quiz question and he was only reaching for a remote-control thingy. The prize this week? A Suzuki hatchback with €10,000 the glove box.

"And if you decide you want the cash and don't want the car... I'm going to tear that car up!" Pat added roguishly. He was, of course, referring to the week before, when he'd ripped up Toy Show tickets while talking to an ungrateful competition winner. I like Pat a lot when he straddles that odd gap between self-conscious and self-aware, and there's no better time to see this version of him than on The Late Late Toy Show.

They say never work with children or animals. In Chaos at the Zoo, makeover guru-ess (that's female for guru) Anna Ryder-Richardson is dealing with the latter. Of course animals and children aren't that similar. If Pat had as many children die on The Late Late Toy Show as Ryder-Richardson had animals die on Chaos at the Zoo, there would be, at the very least, some sort of inquiry. Chaos at the Zoo, on the other hand, is a fupping bloodbath – camels, wallabies, ostriches, all sacrificed at the altar of her self-confessed 'midlife crisis'.

To be fair, Ryder-Richardson was doing her best to improve the cramped conditions at the zoo, but the premise is kind of insulting – she and her family relocate from their "state of the art" Glasgow townhouse to a rundown zoo in Wales which they try to renovate and get running for the summer season. It isn't a new concept – Marie Antoinette had a little farm in the grounds of Versailles in which she would dress as a milk maid.

Anyway, the zoo had 13 primates, 31 birds, 21 reptiles, a porcupine, a colony of meerkats, several members of the horse family, some llamas and a herd of bison (I know what you're thinking – it's the Fine Gael-led coalition government of the late '40s!). Ryder-Richardson's plan was to remove them from their cramped old-fashioned conditions and put them into more open-plan conservation-friendly enclosures. While it's fun to watch rich people in the rain shovelling monkey poo, the novelty fades after a while. And even though there were arguments between Ryder-Richardson and her long-suffering husband, and they know nothing about animal care, and they were clearly out of their depth with the renovation, the schadenfreude was undercut by the fact that this was a rich-woman's vanity project and there's a recession on.

Britney Spears: For the Record was another rich-woman's vanity project – a well-made PR exercise designed to present a repaired and restored Britney to the world, just in time to promote her new album. Britney is likeable, funny and self-aware, but she's also fidgety and melancholic, and what the programme essentially celebrates is her relocation from a cramped cage at a Victorian cruelty zoo to a larger enclosure at Fota Wildlife Park. Britney herself compares her paparazzi-hounded life to prison and says, "It's too in control. There's no excitement. There's no passion. It's groundhog day every day." Watching this documentary made me feel like I was pointing and gawping through the bars, and while that's fun to do with Pat Kenny and animals, it's a tad more troubling when it's a damaged twenty-something with sad eyes.

pfreyne@tribune.ie