the dailymash

'Who wants to play Potatoes in Space?'

The potato, which is being marketed by parents to their confused children as 'Spudalizor Fun Object', narrowly beat a single frayed shoelace, also known as 'Snake-atron', to the top of this year's gift list.

A spokesman for the British Toy Foundation said: "To you or I it's a potato, but to a child with sufficiently low expectations Spudalizor Fun Object is a magical planet covered in a thin layer of dried topsoil with nothing living on it. Or a cool, slightly misshapen ball that doesn't really bounce and soon starts to smell.

He added: "And unlike a Furby it can also be used as food when your child tires of it shortly after 11am."

Other popular children's gifts this Christmas include a selection of forms from the Post Office and an old Lilt bottle that's been refilled with special magic tap water.

Parent Tom Logan said: "I've told my kids Father Christmas was mowed down by an investment banker's chauffeur-driven Bentley and left to die in a ditch like a badger, hence the root vegetable instead of the Tickle Me Elmo Extreme TMX."

He added: "Anyway, Christmas isn't about material things. It's about sitting down with the family and imagining you're watching Moonraker on the rectangular space on the wall where the telly used to be before you got made redundant thanks to a cabal of corrupt public schoolboys who decided to give mortgages to insects so that they could have socks made of spun gold.

"Ho, ho, bastarding ho."