America Letter:It's one of the most successful franchises in television history, attracting more votes each year than a US presidential election, but American Idol may be facing its biggest threat yet - from a skinny 17-year-old from Seattle.
Sanjaya Malakar this week became one of the final 10 contestants on the show that launched the careers of Oscar-winner Jennifer Hudson and Grammy-winners Kelly Clarkson and Carrie Underwood.
With his long, lush hair, his winning smile and androgynous good looks, Sanjaya is a massive hit among 12-year-old girls in the show's studio audience, one of whom wept uncontrollably throughout one of his recent performances.
Sanjaya, who is half Indian, half Italian, has been polling so well in recent weeks that he is on course to win the entire competition, a prospect that fills American Idol's producers with dread. The trouble is, Sanjaya can't sing.
Industry analysts predict that a Sanjaya victory could damage American Idol's credibility so badly that the show could lose one-third of its audience next year. Simon Cowell, the bitchy English judge on the Idol panel, has threatened to resign if Sanjaya wins. And a woman on MySpace.com claims she has stopped eating until Sanjaya is voted off the competition.
After almost two weeks on hunger strike, the woman, called "J", says she is definitely hungry now, but is drinking a lot of fluids. She also says she is "having slight hallucinations". This week, a man identified as "idolmatt21" joined the strike and is encouraging others to join the anti-Sanjaya coalition.
Sanjaya's success may owe something to the support of votefortheworst.com, a website that encourages viewers to vote for him because he is so bad, and talk radio host Howard Stern, who is backing him for the same reason.
American Idol's producers fear the show could go the way of the Eurovision Song Contest, won last year by Finnish horror-metal band Lordi, in becoming more of a joke than a talent show for many viewers.
If this happens, the producers may have only themselves to blame for following a strategy of boosting viewing figures for the early rounds of the show by selecting some freakishly untalented contestants. Most of the excitement was generated by Cowell's cruel assessments of the weaker performers, some of whom he reduced to tears with vicious comments about their appearance as well as their singing. The freak-show strategy has not been enough to halt the decline in viewing figures, which fell by 10 per cent this year, and a Sanjaya victory could deliver the knock-out blow.
Sanjaya's problem is not so much that he has a bad voice as that he has no voice at all and much of the drama of his performances is created by his ever-changing and ever more elaborate hairstyles. Last week he stole the show by tying his hair into seven pony tails to form a majestic "faux-hawk" while he desecrated a song by No Doubt.
Sanjaya mania has not only gripped America's late-night comics but is the subject of analysis on serious programmes too, with Larry King devoting a segment of his CNN show to the phenomenon this week.
If Sanjaya does win American Idol, he would not be the first teenage pin-up to become successful without the benefit of a functioning singing voice. And he has other qualifications for stardom, including a dreamy smile and a sweet-natured affability that allows him to shrug off the weekly slamming he receives from the judges.
Diana Ross knew that Sanjaya had something after she watched him murdering her first hit, Ain't No Mountain High Enough - but she wasn't quite sure what it was.
"There's something in his spirit that is the winning ingredient," she said. "And it's not his hair."
