WITH ALL OF the events for Halloween, the Dublin Marathon, and Metropolis on over the weekend, there’s probably a fair chance that you were too busy to catch The Graham Norton Show the other night. 

If that was the case, you missed out on an interesting discussion between Rick Astley and Emma Stone about the mid 2000s phenomenon of ‘rickrolling’. 

BBC / Youtube BBC / Youtube / Youtube

Out of the panel of guests (Eddie Redmayne, Melissa McCarthy, Jude Law and Emma Stone), Emma was the only celebrity who had personally been rickrolled at some stage. In fact, she had to explain what it was to the other celebs. 

Rick Astley spoke about how it took him a while to understand and accept that he was a meme in the early years of social media. 

I’ve been absolutely fine with it. We have a daughter and she’s 26 now and when that kinda started 10 years ago, she literally sat me down on the couch and said “You do realise, this has nothing to do with you.” I thought, “She’s absolutely right.” It’s just a song somebody chose to do this prank with. I don’t own it anymore, it’s nothing to do with me. 

Little did he know, he was paving the way for countless other individuals who would end up immortalised as memes. When the topic of the music video itself came up, Melissa McCarthy expressed how envious she was of Rick’s outfit in the video for Never Gonna Give You Up. Rick said that unfortunately, his iconic trench-coat was taken from him a long time ago, and he has yet to be reunited with it. 

I actually did an outside broadcast in Northern Ireland back in the day right in the beginning of all of that, and a bunch of kids – right as I was in the middle of trying to be on the radio – they kinda just pulled it off my back and it just drifted off across a crowd of a few hundred, maybe a thousand people and just drifted off into the sunset. 

Sounds like a scene straight from Derry Girls. 

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