KEY POINTS:
In 1990, David Bowie asked fans to choose which of his repertoire of songs he should sing for a world tour.
To the rock star's horror, the public eschewed Space Oddity, Rebel Rebel and the like and instead plumped for an excruciating novelty song, The Laughing Gnome -
"'aven't you got a gnome to go to?" "that's Fred, he's a metro-gnome" etc - that Bowie had recorded in 1967 while still an unknown.
Today, the manufacturers of Monopoly are likewise rueing the peril of the vox populi.
They have asked the public to vote for which towns and cities should feature in the latest French version of their famous board game. And, thanks to a word-of-mouse campaign to rig the ballot, the winner is set to be a small mountain village whose name, in French, sounds like "My Arse".
Montcuq, a village of 1260 souls in France's southwest, takes care to pronounce the final "q" of its name, so that it sounds like the inoffensive "mon kuke". But to any French speaker, the instinct is not to pronounce the last consonant and so the name sounds like "mon cul", (pronounced "mon ku").
Montcuq would have remained in deep obscurity had it not been for a famous TV skit in 1976, when a mock news presenter told the public: "Today, for the first time in television history, I am going to show you mon cul."
The internet ballot closes tomorrow and Montcuq has garnered some 55,000 votes from punters, some of whom have voted from the other side of the world. Voters have also been campaigning for the addition of the Mediterranean village of Chatte - French slang for female genitalia - to the list of candidates.
If Montcuq comes top, it will supplant the Rue de la Paix, the "Mayfair" in France's version of Monopoly.
So far, Paris isn't even on the list of the 21 other most-voted towns which will take up the other slots on the board. Second place is held by the grey Channel port of Dunkirk, which is thousands of votes behind Montcuq.
Hasbro, which makes Monopoly, had trailed its stunt with a big public relations campaign to explain that "this special edition will be sold around the world and will be a shop window for France".
Those words have come back to haunt the company, given the sniggering likely to be prompted by "Advance to My Arse" and "How much is the rent for My Arse?"
That leaves Hasbro with the choice of scrapping the ballot or ignoring the result (as Bowie did), or soldiering on in a cheerful spirit, as Montcuq itself does.
The village is delighted with the income it gets from tourists who get photographed by its road sign and stop for a drink and a souvenirs. It has even named one of its streets "Rue du Petit Rapporteur" after the TV programme that placed it in the nation's spotlight more than 30 years ago.
