CHILDREN FROM A Dublin school were left crying and upset after their performance on the TV3 Toy Show was cut at the last moment.
The pupils, from St Cronan’s Senior National School in Swords, were to perform at the end of the show on Friday night. Teacher Rita Doyle and principal Loreto Desmond both work with the award-winning school choir and had prepared them for the performance.
Speaking to TheJournal.ie, Doyle explained that the choir, who have performed at the National Concert Hall, were approached by TV3 to perform during its festive broadcast.
“We knew it was something the children would love,” she said. They upped their practice sessions, with the pupils coming in for early morning and lunchtime practices in the run-up to the big day.
“It was a huge commitment,” said Doyle. Some parents even bought new Christmas jumpers for the pupils, while it cost the school €300 to pay for a bus to transport the 49 pupils and teachers to the TV3 studio at Ballymount, on the other side of the city.
They also paid for a backing track to be used on the night.
The choir were set to perform at the very end of the show, and went to the set in the TV3 studios at their allotted time.
The pupils walked on at 8.20pm to get into positions.
“They said crackers would go off with confetti and then the music would roll,” said Doyle.
“The crackers went off and I was thinking ‘where’s the music, where is the music’ – I thought I faintly heard it and we started singing.” She thought the absent backing track was a sound error.
“There was no music,” she said. “Then I could hear what I thought was the music for a couple of seconds - I thought it was still live music so I was conducting away and the children were singing away.”
However, she thought she noticed some background noise during the performance, which she thought strange.
(Can’t see the video? Click here)
She discovered afterwards that the performance was not live on the show, and that the Toy Show had finished up before the choir got to complete their performance.
The children’s parents were very upset, said Doyle. “One mother said to me the excitement for this event did not just start today, it started two weeks ago. The children were crying afterwards. There were tears galore.”
On the bus they were very disappointed and were asking lots of questions: ‘Teacher were we not on?’
TV3 has apologised to the school over the issue. In a statement to TheJournal.ie today a spokesperson said:
“Regrettably, a technical error on Friday night meant that the choir who were supposed to sing out our Toy Show Teaser were cut prematurely.
“Understandably the choir, their families and TV3 were deeply disappointed that this happened as we had fully intended to have their performance play out.
We apologise to the choir and their families and to make it up to the St Cronan’s choir, we have offered to have them on The Six O’Clock Show to perform and have offered to go to them to film them singing if coming to TV3 is not convenient.
Commitment
Doyle said she was annoyed given the commitment that was involved from the children, who had to wait for six hours before their performance.
The 49 children were from 4th, 5th and 6th class. “Some of them have been in the choir since they started in our senior school. They wouldn’t be used to anything like this,” said Doyle.
Principal of the school Loreto Desmond said that it was another teacher at the school who noticed the camera going blank during the performance.
When they realised that the choir hadn’t gone live, they consoled the children by telling them it was live TV, and things like this can happen.
“By the time we got home, Twitter had gone mad the parents were really disappointed,” she said.
We have 600 children in the school. They had every granny belonging to them up and down the country primed to watch. One child even talked about her granny is in hospital and had everybody told in the ward. That is the level of disappointment for the parents.
She said that they are keeping the incident in perspective: “But there was huge disappointment in the community.”
It’s not the end of the world but it is disappointing and they are disappointed for the children and how excited they were. I am most disappointed for the wider community and the grannies and all of those who were watching and tuning in to see their grandchild or neighbour’s child – they would be hugely disappointed.
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