Yahoo – AFP,
December 25, 2015
Singer Justin Bieber performs on November 22, 2015 (AFP Photo/Kevin Winter) |
London
(AFP) - A choir of doctors and nurses beat Justin Bieber to the Christmas
number one spot in Britain's pop music chart Friday after the heartthrob urged
his fans to buy their song.
The
Lewisham and Greenwich NHS Choir's charity single, "A Bridge Over
You", outsold Bieber's "Love Yourself" to snatch the coveted
festive top spot.
That came
after Bieber wrote on Twitter Wednesday: "So for 1 week it's ok not to be
#1. Let's do the right thing & help them win. It's Christmas. @Choir_NHS
good luck".
The
southeast London-based choir is made up of staff who work for the state-funded
National Health Service.
Their song
is a mash-up of "Bridge Over Troubled Water" by Simon and Garfunkel
and Coldplay's "Fix You".
Other songs
in this week's top ten which it has beaten include two other hits by Bieber
plus Adele's "Hello" and One Direction's "History".
Harriet Nerva,
a junior doctor in the choir, decided to start a social media campaign to get
the song to number one after a particularly tough day at work.
"A
patient with cancer that I had been looking after for quite a number of weeks
died," she told the Guardian newspaper.
"I was
listening to the song and it dawned on me that a great way of translating how I
was feeling and how proud I was to work for the NHS would be getting (the song)
to number one".
Britain's
NHS is the fifth largest employer in the world, providing health care which is
largely free at the point of delivery.
It is
widely respected, with pollsters YouGov rating it the institution which most
people view positively, and Prime Minister David Cameron's attempts to reform
the service are highly politically sensitive.
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