RTÉ used €75,000 in commercial revenue to conceal low sponsorship for Toy Show musical

Thu, 25 Jan, 2024 - 15:04

Cianan Brennan

RTÉ used €75,000 in commercial revenue to conceal the fact sponsorship of Toy Show: The Musical was below projections, a damning new report has found.

The new report by Grant Thornton partner Paul Jacobs notes risk assessments ahead of the project’s commissioning had found musicals were a “notoriously difficult” proposition to make money from. It also found “significant upfront funding” would have been required.

The show made a €2.2m loss after a brief run at Dublin’s Convention Centre in December 2022.

Briefings for the board of RTÉ were sporadic across early 2022, the report found, while no formal approval of the €2.7m budgeted show was either sought from nor given by the board.

Likewise, despite claims RTÉ’s Audit and Risk Committee (ARC) would be consulted regarding the show, the report concluded the musical was never discussed at any ARC meeting.

However, board members were aware the project was progressing, despite their never having taken a formal vote regarding its approval.

The report found despite declared sponsorship income for the event of €120,000, only three sponsors totalling €45,000 were ever sourced.

In January 2023, a month after the show’s run at Dublin’s Convention Centre, a ledger adjustment was made in RTÉ’s accounts, which saw €75,000 of commercial income transferred to bolster the missing sponsorship money relating to the musical.

The report is entirely anonymised and no one individual is held to be responsible for that transaction.

The transfer was subsequently reversed in July 2023 amid the fallout from a scandal which had recently emerged involving hidden payments to presenter Ryan Tubridy.

Mr Jacobs’ report found on top of the board never formally approving the musical, advance documentation regarding the event was not given to board members in advance of meetings at which the show was first discussed.

One board member who did not attend a combination meeting of the executive committee and RTÉ’s board in March 2022 did not even hear about the musical until a board meeting more than four weeks later.

Ticket sales for the event were shown to be poor almost from the moment they went on sale in May 2022. All told, only 11,044 tickets were sold against projected sellout sales of 107,000. In July 2022, only 72 tickets were sold.

Only two updates were given to the board over a seven-month period — the first from former director general Dee Forbes, who was the only board member not to participate in the report, in May 2022, said simply: “There has been a good reaction to the Toy Show musical and sales are good.”

Some of the 26 individuals consulted for the report acknowledged the risks for the project were not considered carefully, while there was a lack of understanding of generally accepted break-even figures for a musical of that sort.

“I mean the project was accepted very easily,” said one. “There was no forensic interrogation of the figures. I think there was such an air of positivity about this... that the risk wasn’t interrogated deeply.”

One RTÉ board member claimed that, despite the musical being presented as a “fait accompli” by those pitching it in early 2022, to pull the event at that point would have been “catastrophic” as “the ship had left the harbour” at that stage.

“From where I was sitting I mean the ship had left the harbour and was almost ready to dock in its new destination,” said a board member of an update it received in April 2022.

“It was seven months out from actual curtain up at this point... the idea of calling a halt to it at this point I think would have inflicted severe reputational damage to the organisation — it would have been a catastrophic thing to do.”

So I think the sense was this is a fait accompli, this is a thing that is already well established... we have reached a point of no return on this now,” they added.