Pop Idol fans cry foul

Will Young has been a pop idol for less than 48 hours and already the backlash has started. A furious row broke out today after claims that his rival Gareth Gates' chances of winning the TV vote were scuppered by a combination of telephone meltdown and an old-fashioned fix.

So many of the show's 15 million viewers tried to ring in to vote that parts of Britain's telephone network collapsed - 8.7 million had managed to register a vote by the time the 28,000 phone lines shut at 10.20pm on Saturday, making it Britain's biggest phone poll.

Will, 23, ended up beating 17-year-old bookies' favourite Gareth by 500,000 votes. Fans who had been unable to get through today claimed their vote could have made all the difference.

Kenneth Abrey, 64, of Hampton, Middlesex, summed up the mood of voters by saying: "Bookies were going to take a big hit if Gareth won. I wonder whether there was some foul play?"

Such was the sheer weight of calls that, at one stage, ambulance controllers in Bradford were forced to communicate with stations by radio as they were unable to use land lines.

One telecom engineer even suggested that a technical glitch had made it impossible for Gareth's fans to get through to his 05 voting number.

He said: "The 04 number [Will] had such an allocation that it would never be jammed. The 05 number [Gareth] was always going to jam. One had 21,300 lines and the other only had 4,900.

"We couldn't understand why we couldn't re-route through other lines. We were actually told not to. It was obviously designed to jam up one number. From my reading of it, it was fixed, I can't see any other reason."

ITV and BT - which jointly provided the lines - denied there was anything sinister behind the voting problems.

A spokesman for Pop Idol said: "It's insulting to Will to suggest his win was for any other reason than public choice. Allegations of a fix are completely and utterly untrue. The lines are not allocated to one number or other. Calls are put through to whichever line is free, regardless of the number dialled."

"Gareth and Will were leapfrogging each other all-night in the vote, and there was no way of telling which way it was going to go. If we had kept the lines open for a bit longer - even just five minutes - it could have swung back to Gareth."

Away from the controversy, Will Young was today facing a punishing schedule as he bids to capitalise on his surprise success. He will begin promotional appearances and recording sessions this week, as well as shooting the video for his double-A-side debut single, Evergreen and Anything Is Possible.