One advertisement for BoyzToyzLive! suggested: 'If you're a lover of fast cars, extreme sports, toys and games or just beautiful girls, then the Pepsi Max BoyzToyzLive! show is the place to be on the 17th and 18th of September.' Any expectations that the event would be one highlighting speed, risk, and glamour - something for stubbly men with excess cash, adrenalin and sex appeal - proved, however, entirely erroneous. This was a show about cars, for slightly overweight men who like cars, and things to do with cars.

For instance - in reverse order of the wares hawked in the ad. - the 'just beautiful girls' were pretty thin on the ground. The 'FHM Highstreet Honeys' promised in a flier were nowhere to be seen, leaving only 'glamour girls' from Pepsi Max and Cool FM who - a quick experiment with Stuart revealed - only approached lone men, despite advertised assurance that the fair was for 'girls too!'. Other eye-candy came in the form of an unconvincing Daisy Duke impersonator, and an unfinished Saddam Hussein-style 'fantasy' wood sculpture of a naked lady in heels, courtesy of a man with a chainsaw.

The 'toys and games' and 'extreme sports' components of the show were also slightly half-hearted, shabby and testosterone-free affairs. Although the mountain board ramp took up most of the main hall, its clients were dreadlocked youths rather than boyish rogues. The paintball equipment seemed to be for display only. The climbing wall was weedy and patently unisex. Video games, introverted and unathletic as they are, were, anyway, mostly driving games, just boosting the overall car-dominance of the day.

And while actual sports, like football and rugby, were poorly served by a few stalls selling magazines and posters, some of the gadgets on display, conversely, had pretty faint claim to being a 'boy's toy'. Yes air hockey and table football were available, as were hot tubs (with instant credit), whose bloke-factor probably lay less in the Highstreet Honeys they might be imagined accommodating, than in the long list of the tub's bullshit-sounding technical features: 'jets, waterfalls, airpump, ozonater…'. But why was there an oxygen bar upstairs? (Oxygen's benefits include, apparently, improved concentration, alertness and memory, but what it definitely does, I can testify, is make you look like you're on life-support for the five minutes that the tubes are in place, after which you'll feel compelled to rub your itching nose like a coke-addict - wherein, perhaps, lies its Xtreme appeal.) And why was there a stall selling handcarved soap and (for a bargain £3) battery-powered 'luck-beckoning' Chinese cats?

Actually, the lucky cats were there because the stall-owner also imported tuk-tuks - Thai three-wheeled vehicles ('Now Road Legal!') - and the tuk-tuks were there because BoyzToyz are, in the final analysis, anything on wheels. Granted, the vehicular emphasis may have come from the fact that, by a stroke of sheer good luck, this year's Pepsi Max BoyzToyzLive! Show was, for the first time, held simultaneously with the Northern Ireland truck show. This meant that, in addition to browsing through convertibles, 4x4s and mobile homes, you could go outside and see men polishing cabs in different, shiny colours - cabs with Joey Dunlop motifs on them! You could get your photograph taken inside with the cars from The Dukes of Hazard (hence Daisy Duke) and Smokey and the Bandit, and outside you could sit in 'Big Joe', the monster truck, and get a poster - included in the price!

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Then there was the car and truck paraphernalia. There were rows of additional lamps to transform your truck into a kind of mad spaceship, irresistible to women; and strange native American accessories: windcatchers and feathery things, that the stall owner doesn't appreciate you looking at ironically. For car owners with really disposable income, a dealer in personalised number plates offered a series of mysteriously priced combinations: the first three letters of my name would cost me £495, while, for reasons I don't understand, '44 BN' is £6,995. Something like 'TY 03 CUP', referring to the Sam Maguire Cup, seems to be so desirable that (unfortunately for Tyrone Fans), it will only be divulged to seriously interested parties. But most of the registrations are so obscure that the names they are supposed to denote have to be placed in brackets after the number: 'C19 THL' (Cathel): £1,795; 'M40 KLE' (Mackle) £2,995; 'MII VCE' (mince) £995. Mince? Who wants a number plate that says 'Mince'? Maybe a butcher. Maybe a butcher called Cathel from the country, who'll probably drive so fast that no one can read his registration anyway, in which case he can also take advantage of the 'Speed Camera Defence' equipment available here (legal apparently), and maybe even the new (also expensive) vehicle-tracking GPS system, with which he can track his butcher underlings on his PC, or which his wife will secretly install in order to find out whose driveway he's parking in. Finally, maybe he'll get First Aid after a crash from someone in the Red Cross, or the kids he beats in a fit of prolonged road rage will be aided by the NSPCC, both of whom had stalls here, in a strange effort at responsibility among all this fun.

And on the subject of children, more or less, perhaps the weirdest thing about the BoyzToyzLive! show was the miniature vehicles for kids - little motors for junior, for the chip off the old block. This isn't just because there's something genuinely disconcerting in seeing a four year old on a scaled down motorbike, but because of the circular logic to 'boyztoyz' that it suddenly illuminates. So, fast cars, trucks and bikes are characterised as 'toys' for grown men: frivolous, silly, harmless, and a bit childish? Genuine little boys, meanwhile, play with (genuine) toys in the form of small versions of these cars, trucks and bikes. Boys being boys, presumably they're playing with toy cars because they think the real big manly thing is pretty amazing. Then, do they graduate to the real thing, only to find an adult interest in motors is construed as evidence of them never having grown up? I don't get it. Is the child's toy an aspirational model for manhood? Or is a flashy car just a big shiny toy for a retarded man-boy? And does this therefore mean that there actually is no difference between men and boys other than size? In which case, should boy-children be allowed to drive, if they can? Or should neither be allowed cars at all? Should this kind of fair even be legal? BoyzToyzLive! took place at the Kings Hall, Belfast on the 17th & 18th September 2005.

Photographs by Chris Heaney & John Duncan.

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