Radio Times Radio & Podcast Poll 2017

The Radio Times Radio & Podcast Poll 2017 was a competition held by the Radio Times, a UK TV listing magazine, in July 2017, to determine who their "Podcast Champion" of the year would be. The competition had several stages, culminating in an elimination bracket, and people were allowed to vote as many times as they wished. Grey and Brady were both placed in Group D, one of the four groups of sixteen that contestants were placed in at the beginning of the competition. While both Grey and Brady passed rounds one and two successfully, Grey was eliminated in round three by a London based radio talk show host named Steve Allen. Brady then faced Allen in the next round, which were the quarterfinals. Allen then tweeted to his Twitter followers that he was facing "another person I've never heard of", referring to both Brady and Grey as people he never heard of, which was interpreted as sounding demeaning by Grey, Brady, and the Tims. The Tims organized on the Hello Internet subreddit to make sure that Brady would not lose to Allen like Grey had. In order to win the vote, Tims took advantage of the fact that they were allowed to vote as many times as they wanted and created and shared with each other voting javascript scripts that would automatically and repeatedly vote for Brady. Because of this, Brady won his vote against Allen and proceeded to the semifinals, which he won as well.

In the final, Brady faced James O' Brian, a colleague of Steve Allen. To guarantee Brady's victory in the final, the Tims improved the scripts they had previously used against Steve Allen in the quarterfinals, and a webpage that automatically ran the voting script was created to simplify the process of automatically voting so that more Tims could vote with the script for Brady. Graphs with automatically updating results of who was winning in the poll were created to show the results over time in the poll against Steve Allen and in the poll against James O' Brian. James O' Brian fans noticed that the Tims were using voting algorithms and complained to the Radio Times about it. The Radio Times then added a CAPTCHA to the poll in order to stop all of the voting scripts from working. Several hours later however, the CAPTCHA was removed, which allowed the Tims, and the James O' Brian fans who had modified the scripts to vote for O' Brian, to automatically vote again. Brady ended up winning the poll, although the Radio Times did not mention the results of the poll or claim that Brady had won the poll on Twitter, as they had done with the champions of other polls, due to the fact that algorithms were used in the poll to guarantee Brady's victory.

In an episode of Hello Internet after the poll was finished, Brady and Grey discussed the poll and the fact that people were allowed to vote multiple times in the poll. Grey also gave Brady a new microphone as a symbol of his victory in the poll. Steve, a term referring the first name of Steve Allen, was coined to refer to the opponents of the Tims. Two other terms were coined during the poll as well: timwork and timfoolery.