Idol's all over when the fat man sings

By JEREMY REES AND AGENCIES

As any TV junkie knows by now, Ruben Studdard, who looks like a younger soul singer Barry White, has won American Idol.

In a show hated by the critics and watched by the millions, American viewers voted for Studdard, dubbed the "Velvet Teddy Bear", over the geeky Clay Aiken.

For hundreds of thousands of New Zealand viewers, the excruciatingly drawn-out talent show, screening on TV2 and Sky TV's E! Channel, with its wannabe stars and judges ranging from the saccharine to the nasty, was a must watch.

Around the country, people either logged on to American websites, since the verdict was announced several hours before the show screened here, or determinedly tried not to know.

"Every other conversation down Queen St today was people saying, 'Don't tell. Don't tell who won'," said one fan.

The final sing-off on Wednesday night hit a rating of 14 or 500,000 viewers, easily beating TV One's Always Greener and TV3's CSI, as well as placing it within crooning distance of the usual top raters such as Holmes.

The figures for last night's show will be available today.

In the United States, the final show caused a huge surge in phone traffic as viewers voted for their favourite then phoned friends to talk about it.

Telephone company Verizon, which processes more than 1.5 billion phone calls on an average week day, saw an increase of 116 million calls.

"That's a significant jump, which can be attributed in large part to the massive amount of calls placed to the American Idol hot lines," the company said.

Suzy Henderson, from US phone company SBC, said: "People call friends and family to discuss the programme."

SBC processed more than 260 million calls during the three-hour voting window, a hefty 100 million calls more than a typical week night.

The show's producers said 24 million Americans voted. That tally would be about the same number of people who voted in America's 2002 mid-term elections in the giant states of California, Florida, New York, Ohio and Texas.

The Idols vote divided America between Studdard, charismatic, black and fat, and Aiken, geeky, white and skinny.

The Herald's TV critic, Michele Hewitson, found herself on the wrong side of the vote, saying in Wednesday's paper she would have given Clay Aiken her vote.

"Anyone who can sing the dreadful Vincent ("The world was never meant for one as beautiful as you ... ") even more badly than I do, and on television, deserves to become a legend in his own shopping mall," she wrote.

Aiken, 24, sang his way into the final 12 line-up courtesy of a wild card, despite being told at the outset that he didn't have a pop-star image.

But yesterday, the idol was the unflappable Studdard, complete with soulful voice, smile and the number "205" - the telephone code for Birmingham, Alabama - on his clothes. His winning margin was just 130,000.

American Idol has been a huge hit for the Fox Network, which turned nobodies with names like Kelly and Tamyra into household faces and generated 230 million votes in the past 10 weeks. Pity New Zealanders couldn't vote.