Can you keep a secret along with 15,999 of your friends?

I’ve always been a little mystified by the “flash mob” concept. They always pretend they were huge surprises in whatever venues they perform in (in fact there’s a pretense of spontaneity), but at least for the best-known ones, there must have been pretty substantial video setups in advance, which you’d think would tip everybody off that something was going to happen (although admittedly video cameras wouldn’t attract much attention at, say, a train station). And inevitably many friends of the performers would show up. Maybe there are more effective ones that we don’t know about exactly because they couldn’t get good video of them.

 

Anyway, this particular example from England’s Rock Choir stretches the idea beyond belief. If 16,000 people are going to erupt into song simultaneously in 38 different places, that would be a pretty hard secret to keep, to say nothing of the fact that they’re mostly in costume, and they have recorded accompaniment, which would also need to have been prepared ahead of time.