Having somewhat of a backlog of books to read, DVDs to watch and so forth, I was going to not bother choosing anything trom Amazon’s Vine programme to review this month – I still have a film and a bit of software to review from last month.     I still looked at the monthly newsletter when it arrived and just could not resist a toy called Terry Turtle.  It looked like it might be fun, and would certainly take little time to try out and review.  I was not disappointed.Here is what I said about it:

This could be the Big Mouth Billy Bass for 2009 – remember that? Everyone thought it was hilarious, they flew off the shelves and then everybody realised it was a one-joke toy and the joke wore thin after a while.

At the moment I am still at the greatly-amused stage and I am only assuming that the novelty will wear off and the thing will join the remote-controlled Dalek in the cupboard to be brought out when distinguished visitors are calling. The cat also enjoys this new addition to the household.

This is truly a toy that ‘does what it says on the tin’. You get a plastic turtle and it swears. There are two controls, so you effectively get four modes of operating. You can choose PG or uncensored language. The PG mode has the same phrases and words; they are slurred or obscured but you can still tell what they are in the same way as merely putting an asterisk in place of ‘u’ in the nation’s favourite swear word does not fool anybody. If you are going to be offended by, or don’t want your children exposed to, the full swearing then you are likely to be just as unhappy with the PG version.

The other option is to turn the sensor on. With the sensor off the turtle fires off a verbal barrage when you press the button on its chest. With the sensor on it lets loose a tide of filth when you press the button, or move close to it, or even when you are nowhere near it. After a certain amount of inactivity the turtle will let rip at random moments.

Not very educational at all. Most youngsters seem to know all these words as soon as they can speak these days. Physically it seems very durable. I expect the novelty will wear out before the toy does, in some cases even before the batteries (3 x AA. Supplied) run out.

Depending on how easily amused you are, even with diminishing returns many people will get their money’s worth out of this. I’m quite happy with it now and looking forward to having it insult friends and family when they come round.

For what it is, it seems pretty good. It only does one thing, but it does it reasonably well. My only criticism is that with modern storage technology it would be easy to hold a lot more than 25 obscenities. What they really need is a version 2.0 with a few megabyes of memory and the contents of Viz magazine’s “Roger’s Profanisaurus” programmed in. Now that would stay interesting a lot longer!

Subsequently I thought that you could even make it so that you can record your own personal favourite profanities, but that could take it into Furby territory.  The limited vocabulary really is a big downer though.  A larger range would not necessarily make it funnier, but it would make the fun last longer.

A very trivial artefact, but possibly a handy emergency talking point to be whipped out if, for example, Prince Charles is round for tea and the conversation starts flagging.