Were Lego bricks, with those silly great towers, really the best the 20th century could do in the way of toys?

This week I discovered that there is something called the British Association of Toy Retailers. It even has a boring name. Why couldn't it be called the British Association of Toy Sellers? Then it could be known as BATS. That would be a bit funnier. Or it could be the British Organisation of Toy Sellers, in which case it would probably be prosecuted under Section 28.

But enough of creating amusing acronyms out of the names of retail groups. This week, BATR announced its toys of 1999 and its toys of the entire century. The craze of 1999 was "Alien Eggs". If you don't have a child at primary school, then you've probably never heard of them. To describe them as plastic creatures in jelly in a plastic egg doesn't evoke their full yuckiness. Let me put it this way. Anti-abortion extremists will no longer be able to cause shock by distributing pictures of aborted foetuses. Children will look at them and just say: "Can you get me one of those for Christmas?" Our children claim that the "aliens" grow and that, if you put two of them together, they can even mate, but we've seen no evidence of this - I would suggest it as the basis for a horror movie, but Joe Dante already has done it with Gremlins (featuring toys that anticipated Furbies by a decade).

But the really sad thing was the choice of the toys that were nominated as the great achievements of the century. Lego was the toy of the century; Monopoly was the game of the century; the yo-yo was the craze of the century. Was that it? Was that all we could come up with?

It's not that I argue with the choices. What were the alternatives? I tried to come up with some better crazes, but I could only think of the Hula-Hoop and clackers. Remember clackers? They were two plastic balls hanging on strings. You banged them together a couple of times, then banged them harder, and they bounced up and hit each other at the top of the circle, then bounced back and hit each other at the bottom of the circle. I once saw a child on Blue Peter who was able to keep them bouncing like that indefinitely. For everybody else, the balls hit each other once or twice, then got out of sync and hit your wrist agonisingly.

The best you can say for Monopoly is that it isn't Totopoly (like Monopoly, except with horses) or Mousetrap. Has anybody in history ever actually played a game of Mousetrap? Of course not. Everybody just sets up the joke Heath Robinson-style mousetrap, tries it out a couple of times, and then puts it back in the cupboard for ever. Experts argue that it is useful preparation for later life, when you do the same with the pasta-maker.

The yo-yo is the best of the three, even if it is, essentially, juggling for people who can't be bothered to learn how to juggle. The Monopoly board has a certain Mondrian-like elegance and the counters - the shoe, the hat, the racing car - are fun, but the game itself is a curious combination of boredom and cruelty - that seemingly endless process of collecting rents of £9 and £14, followed about four hours later by the different players being ground into the dust. Children whimper, adults sulk.

But then, Lego is educational, isn't it? It was invented by a Dane. To quote Philip Larkin, in a pig's arse it is. I've done a lifetime's research into this subject and it has been scientifically established that, after the first half hour, children only use Lego bricks for one purpose, namely to tip them out of the box and make them into a single tower which then collapses in the middle and shatters on the floor, sending bricks flying into every corner of the room. We all grew up on Lego bricks, and the sight of those little sockets has a certain resonance. What has an even greater resonance is the feel of them, by which I mean the sensation when you tread on one in bare feet while staggering down a corridor in the dark. It's at that moment that you remember that the Danes also invented wooden sandals.

A spokesman was quoted as saying that Lego has moved with the times, but all that means is that when you buy a Lego set shaped as a Furby or the spaceship in The Matrix, it's full of pieces that can only be used for that one model and make no sense once they've found their way into the general toy-box. Which, one suspects, is part of the point. Nutritionists used to say of breakfast cereal that you'd be better off eating the box. It's certainly true of most games that the children end up playing with the box and having a better time.

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