SOCIETY / PEOPLE

List: Top Ten Greatest Finns (Finnish people)

Date: December 2004

Source: Viewers poll by YLE (National Television broadcaster of Finland)

Base: No data on numbers voting. At the final stage of voting the people had the chance to vote for three leading candidates.

Notes: 'Suuret suomalaiset' (Great Finns) was a Finnish spinoff-version of the 'Great Britons' programme on the BBC. The top ten are all "serious" persons, but in the voting outside the top ten there were a large number of candidates voted for in a more jokey sense. For example, position 12 was held by Vaino Myllyrinne - the tallest Finnish person ever. In the Finnish language, the words "great", "tall" and "big" are interchangeable with the word "suuri", which is used in the name of the program. Thus, voting for Myllyrinne was a play on words and his score was boosted by a large Internet campaign on his behalf. After the results were published, there was much speculation on the issue of whether the broadcaster YLE had manipulated the results in order to keep the joke candidates out of the top ten. YLE rebuffed the accusations but refused to publish the number of votes that candidates below the top ten received.