The top children’ toys - as revealed by child testers


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Eight lucky youngsters were recently selected to be professional ’toy testers’, courtesy of leading London toy megastore, Hamleys. Four boys and four girls aged between seven and 11 will be spending a day a month at the store playing with a mission.

‘We needed to find out what was going on in children’s lives’, explained Hamleys’ Chief Executive, Simon Burke. ‘If a child goes off a toy it takes time for the message to get through to the parents - and even longer before we see a decline in sales. By then we might have ordered lots more that we wouldn’t be able to sell.’

Not surprisingly the job proved to be highly popular with some 4,000 applicants vying for the eight places. Some four hundred were interviewed before the final line-up was decided. Mr Burke was expressly looking for ‘Children who showed confidence without being too overbearing as well as being articulate and not afraid to express their opinions.’

Following their first day of sampling the latest playthings, top boy toys apparently emerged as Lego Studio, Newborn Teksta and Extreme Skateboarder. Girls preferred Popstars Dolls, Diva Stars and Bill and Ben Beanies.

One young tester, Thomas Parry aged 8, is on record as being unimpressed by Thunderbirds, asking, ‘Well, what’s the point? It’s stupid. You can see their strings and everything‘. Thomas, it appears, prefers more technical offerings like ‘remote-control cars and robots.‘ One of his co-testers, seven year old Georgina Hamilton,

makes no secret of her predilection for replica pop star figures, explaining, ‘They’re just like they are on the telly. The S Club 7 dolls even sing to you.’

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