Panel to pick Joseph school choir

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The BBC has decided a panel of experts will now choose the winner of a school choir contest that was supposed to be judged by a public vote.

Choirs uploaded videos of themselves on to a website, in a contest running alongside TV show Any Dream Will Do.

People could then rate the choirs online. But the BBC said the process had been compromised by evidence of block voting and technical problems.

A panel will choose the winner from 843 entries to perform at the show's final.

The BBC had accused some online voters of unfairly trying to boost their choir's chances.

The winner of the contest was due to be announced on the Any Dream Will Do website on 31 May but this has now been postponed.

Andrew Lloyd Webber will help choose the winner

It is not yet known when the winning choir will be notified but it will still perform during the show's final on 9 June as originally planned.

The Any Dream Will Do talent contest is seeking someone to star in the lead role of Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat in London's West End.

The 843 choir entries will be whittled down to 20 by the same expert panel who selected the Joseph finalists from regional heats, which includes the show's vocal coach and judge, Zoe Tyler.

The winner will then by chosen by Andrew Lloyd Webber and fellow composer Howard Goodall.

Repeat votes

On the website, schools had been ranked on the average rating they got, from five for excellent to one for poor - not simply by how many votes they picked up.

Some people might have misunderstood what they had to do.

"When you rate, you need only click on one multicoloured coat," the website explained.

Graham Norton (centre) hosts Any Dream Will Do

"So, for example, if you wish to rate the choir a four, you click on the fourth coat along in the row. You should not click coats one, two, three and four."

But there were also claims that people not only repeatedly gave their own choir the highest rating, but also repeatedly gave a low rating to competitors.

In their "frequently asked questions", the producers said the contest had been "far more popular than we anticipated", with hundreds of votes per minute straining the database.

Richard Williams, who is in charge of the show's website, told Radio 4 programme You and Yours that they were "caught short".

"We're a bit embarrassed that we couldn't cope with the popularity of it," he said.

'Let down'

A statement on the show's website said: "This is our first experience of running a website competition of this kind which has attracted such an unprecedented response, so viewers can be assured that lessons have been learned and this will not happen in the future.

"We sincerely apologise to the school choirs and those who have voted who will be disappointed with this outcome at such a late stage," it continued.

In online forums, comments included: "My respect for the BBC has plummeted beyond belief!" and "The whole thing has been one disaster after another, only hope they apologise on the TV show to the thousands of kids who feel let down."

Joseph was written as a school musical and remains enormously popular with children.

It was first performed in 1968 but it is estimated that there are still nearly 500 school or amateur productions each year in the UK alone.