The mischief of crowds

So, Rick Astley is the Best Act Ever.

The Rick Rollers have succeeded in getting Astley crowned in the MTV Europe Music Awards.

All credit to MTV which has been quite good-natured about it:

"We've been well and truly Rickrolled,” said Richard Godfrey, a senior vice-president at MTV and executive producer of the awards.

Sadly it seems that much of the voting wasn't true crowd-sourcing:

“People set up computer programs to bombard the website. They could be sitting in Croydon, but they made it look like they were voting from the Philippines. We put in all sorts of blocks because we wanted to be as fair as possible, but it made no difference.”

If true, that makes the victory hollow in a way that it wouldn't otherwise have been.

Still, all credit to MTV for taking it on the chin. What a shame that David Bowie didn't manage to summon up the same courage in 1990.

Bowie had announced that the set list for his greatest hits tour would be decided by a telephone vote. NME campaigned for people to vote for Bowie's cringingly awful 1973 hit "The Laughing Gnome"resulting in the voting system being scrapped.