I went to the British Toy Fair today.

Almost everyone I’ve mentioned it to has asked me if the giant floor piano out of the film Big would be there…

Sadly, it wasn’t.

But it was all work and no play for me. For a toy fair, what really struck me was how serious everyone was! You had to wear a badge with your company name on. You could tell whenever you walked by one of the stands, they’d look at your company name before they’d approach you for the ‘hard sell’. If you weren’t “worthy”, they’d turn their noses up and move on to someone else who might have more money to spend. Nice and friendly then.

Anyway… what was there?

Well, Lego had a cool stand with all their latest stuff on and some impressively large displays. There was also a touch sensitive floor with a video of a shallow seabed projected onto it. Whenever you walked across it, the ‘virtual water’ would ripple in real time and the fish would flee accompanied by an appropriate foot splashing water sound effect.

There was also a big Hagrid made out of Lego, next to, err, a dinosaur (obviously). Perhaps they had a surplus of brown and yellow bricks to use up? I suppose that’s a better solution than building an enormous sweetcorn textured turd.

Hmmm, what else? There were some scary and slightly comical Steve Irwin toys (minus sting ray), more normal things like Shaun the Sheep and other stuff I didn’t expect to see (I bought 3 of those).

All very helpful. Million pound business… here we come…