The Late Late Toy Show’s John Joe connects online & offline

by Diarmuid O'Riordan on January 24th, 2010

Oh to be young again. John Joe is at that great age, he is 8. He is discovering the magic of Roald Dahl, the delight in laughing hysterically at nothing in particular and the general rough and tumble of being a happy and carefree young lad. And all of us can remember wondering what we wanted to be when we grew up: a soccer player, a farmer, a fireman, an horologist, or maybe we wanted to line out for our county on All Ireland Final day.

Now I know what your thinking, no child in their right mind would want to be a farmer with the price of milk the way it is.. Your right, it is a dead-end job. A horologist on the other hand; that’s a profession for an 8-year-old to aspire to! And thats just what our friend John Joe wants to be.

John Joe is a one of a kind. He got a style and vocabulary of an old English gent, the logic defying sense of humour only an 8-year-old can have and he wants to be an horologist when he grows up. There are 47,077 members on the “I want John Joe from the Late Late Toy Show to fix my Clock” group on Facebook, and the RTE video on YouTube has had 220,739 views. John Joe’s “Clockside mix” dance tune has had 78,784 views!

There is something more to his new found fame than just the obvious. Its very similar to the Breffmania group which has 26,816 members on Facebook. I think people in these groups are getting most of their information from the web, but they still have their quota of TV, maybe 2 or 3 shows a week. Shows like the Toy Show, The Apprentice and the X Factor are filling a lot of these people’s quotas.

The less TV people watch, the more interested they are in what shows they do actually view. Perhaps people are viewing these shows with the attitude that it is more of an event, more of a novelty; like they feel about going to the cinema. So when they do watch, They want to get online to see what everyone else thinks and to get their views across also.

Traditional media still has a huge ability to connect people, and the evidence of this is the fast growing online communities growing as a result of offline content. Perhaps the future of offline media lies largely in their ability to connect with their audience online.