ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses some of the elements of television interactivity, most specifically as these can be elucidated through tensions between the show's judges and the choices of the voting viewer audience. Australian Idol, the Australian talent quest for singers made to the format of the British show Pop Idol, first aired in 2001. The Idol format has proved to be incredibly popular with viewers and has now been picked up in over thirty countries from the United States to Kazakhstan and Malaysia. In Idol, where the audience votes for the person they like in order to keep them in the competition, there is a greater sense of audience and contestant community – and, therefore, a greater audience and, one would expect, much greater voting. The formal claim of Australian Idol is that it seeks to find the best singer in the competition and it uses a voting system that, it implies, enables ordinary people to bring this about.
