Why I love Pop Idol

Confessions are never easy. You never know how people will react. But you look like the sympathetic sort, so here goes. My name is Peter and I am an Idoloholic.

Yes, tomorrow evening at 7.10, I shall take the phone off the hook, stop reading the appendix to the latest report on PPP and the Tube, tidy away the proofs of "Cluster Analysis: A New Paradigm for Survey Research", and cut myself an hour-long dose of Pop Idol.

When I first caught up with this addictive televisual drug a few weeks ago, I was sure I could handle it. Just a few minutes away from my desk, and then I would be back to my Excel spreadsheets and council voting trends. But I stayed and sniffed. I was gripped by a power too great to resist. Tomorrow night I shall be on the kind of high that is normally induced only by Peter Snow's swingometer.

So I confess; but should I really be so defensive? When I first disclosed my addiction at an office meeting earlier this week, and so triggered the chain of events that has led to this article, the first reaction of some of my colleagues was incredulity. They know me as a sad but harmless eccentric who buys the News of the World only for its opinion polls. But as the days passed, it became clear that others shared, if not my craving, then at least my Saturday evening viewing habits.

People I would not have expected would debate the rival merits of tomorrow night's two finalists. Would Will Young win because of his superior voice, or Gareth Gates, who joins the illustrious company of George VI and the Emperor Claudius in winning public esteem for his bravery in confronting a stammer? How did Darius Danesh survive to reach third place? Can Zoe Birkett, with that amazing, powerful voice of hers, really be only 16?

Perhaps, though, I should not have been surprised. Pop Idol has seized the imagination of millions of people across every kind of social, intellectual and demographic divide. If a full analysis of tomorrow night's audience were done, I would wager my valuable first edition of Eminent Victorian By-Elections that more professors, company directors and Whitehall mandarins will watch tomorrow night's Pop Idol than tonight's Newsnight.

Among my own circle, viewers waiting nervously for the result will include a government minister, a sophisticated newspaper editor, a high-ranking BBC current affairs executive and a senior NHS policy adviser.

Bookies whose main business is financial betting say that far more of their clients have had a punt on tomorrow night's victor than on any previous " reality TV" show. I wish I had joined them, and bet on Will last week. I may not be able to tell my arias from my Elgar, but I do know the sound of a beautiful voice and the meaning of 7-1. When Iain Duncan Smith. was visiting Glasgow last week, a press photographer thrust into his arms a T-shirt saying "Vote Darius". Far from asking what on earth this was all about, the Tory leader knew instantly what was at stake. "I would be very happy if he was to win. I wish him the best of luck". It was yet another bad call by the Tories: the following night, Darius was knocked out.

Why, though, does Pop Idol appeal to so many people of every kind? There is an easy, cynical answer: that it is slick, formulaic and easy to watch. Those things are true, and if audiences had stuck at around six million, would possibly be the whole truth. But around 15 million are likely to watch tomorrow's final. To grow into the kind of phenomenon it has, a lot more is needed.

The first important thing about it is that it is live. In an era when so much television is pre-recorded and heavily edited, Pop Idol is raw drama. When Hayley's voice let her down three weeks ago, she could not do a retake. "Nasty" Simon Cowell, the judge whose acid comments through the series have sometimes made Anne Robinson sound like an indulgent aunt, could not take back his words when he has been outrageously cruel.

Pop Idol is about the cult of celebrity. It is rooted in the Romantic idea that artists express, above all, their personality, that a great artist is bound to have a special sort of personality - so that anyone with personality is some sort of artist. This explains the cult of Dylan Thomas - a talented, flawed, often unintelligible poet who drank, talked, died sadly young and was therefore indisputably a genius. Whereas possibly the greatest poet of the 20th century - TS Eliot - was a bankclerk, wore four-piece suits (as Virginia Woolf described them), and argued that true art should be impersonal.

In creating a celebrity, Pop Idol at the same time manages to create a compelling drama around the lives of some young and (in the final stages) highly talented men and women, and involve us in deciding its denouement. We care, if only vicariously, what happens to them. In an age when most celebrities are pre-packaged, privately road-tested, cut off from normal folk and finally served up for inspection - and that applies to politics every bit as much as to show business - Pop Idol has created celebrities out of ordinary people before our eyes, and given us the direct power over the past three months to build them up or cut them down.

As a result, millions of us feel we know them and can identify with their families. When we root for any of them, we are rooting for the success of a far more genuinely "people's" celebrity than when a Manchester United fan cheers on David Beckham or a Labour activist canvasses for Tony Blair.

Whether tomorrow night's winner will be able to survive, let alone enjoy, his celebrity status for more than a few months is a moot point. Meanwhile, I shall be rooting for Will, and have a sneaking suspicion that he could come from behind to take the prize. I may even throw caution to the wind, splurge 10p and ring up to vote for him. However, unlike some viewers, I shall vote only once. It is not that I am mean; it is that "Election Nerd in Vote-rig Scandal" is a headline I could do without.