Bedroom popstars, desperately miming their favourite hits, are going head-to-head on the internet, writes Alexa Moses.

THE video clip shows a fully clothed Katy Relf standing in her shower cubicle miming the words to the Kelly Clarkson song Since U Been Gone. A few seconds later, the action switches to the living room where Anthony Moy, resplendent in a red wig, takes over vocal duties.

This no-budget production, shot in a house in Taree and edited on a laptop computer, is one of the thousands of homemade music clips circulating on the internet.

Many are rough-and-ready affairs shot in teenagers' bedrooms; others are more ambitious, using costumes, props and even specially constructed sets to ape, honour or satirise the original production. What they all share is the raw enthusiasm of the performers who bounce, gyrate and grimace for the camera.

The phenomenon is as global as the net. A cursory search uncovers Sullio from France lip-synching to Colombian hip-shaker Shakira in a ratty blonde wig. Canadian teenagers Katja and Bracha turn in a histrionic, tear-soaked cover of Eric Carmen's All By Myself and Brits Gary and Tom pulverise the boy-band genre with a Take That mime that's heavy on sighs, cheeky grins, and preppie outfits.

The lip-synching craze stems from 2004, when Gary Brolsma, a chubby, bespectacled teen from New Jersey videoed himself lip-synching the words to an obscure Romanian pop song with a title that translates roughly as Love by the Linden Trees. He posted his performance online and it became a sensation. The Numa Numa Dance, as it quickly became known, was featured on CNN, The New York Times wrote an article about it, and hundreds of copies flooded the web. Brolsma quickly became uncomfortable with all the attention and now avoids interviews. But in a Pop Idol world, many teens have seen Brolsma's approach as a route to stardom.

In June, a 20-year-old US receptionist, Brooke Brodack, scored an 18-month deal with Carson Daly's production company after the talk-show host saw her performing music clip parodies on the website YouTube.com. Few online performers will get this lucky. But even the more moderately talented lip-synchers can enjoy a taste of glory by entering one of the competitions on a site called Google Idol, the brainchild of Brisbane IT worker Ben Petro.

Petro launched the site earlier this year after hours of watching amateur videos on the Google video site. He had the idea of pitting videos against each other and created Google Idol (googleidol.com). Anyone with an internet connection can vote for their favourite homemade music video clip in a knockout tournament comprising four heats, two semi-finals and a final. So far, votes for each competition are in the tens of thousands.

Relf and Moy, who were runners-up in Google Idol's first music video grand final, were overwhelmed by the response to their clip for Since U Been Gone. It attracted 12,000 votes, regular email from fans from Germany and the Netherlands, and was shown on German TV. "In Google Video you can check to see how many people have watched and downloaded. Over 300,000 people have viewed it. It's insane," Moy says.

Moy watches the videos, and not just to scope out the competition. "It's just average people, the average Joe," he says. "It's not manufactured; it's just a bit of a laugh. What can you get away with? You're taking off this big music star."

New Zealand brother and sister Emma and Michael Smart are part of the Google Idol kids' competition. Emma, 19, saw the children's competition and made a video of Michael, 9, miming a classy version of Robbie Williams's Have You Met Miss Jones, complete with sepia tones. "He's got a certain thing in front of the camera," Smart says. "He's got a spark in his eye, he changes in front of the camera. Now he thinks he's a star."

Petro vets all the videos that go into the competition with the help of his girlfriend, schoolteacher Brooke Bell. He receives about 100 videos a week, from which the pair choose 10 to add to the competition. "It takes me 20 to 25 hours a week," he says. "Fortunately I don't have any children, and me and my girlfriend sit at home all weekend and work. She hasn't left me yet."

Having watched mind-numbing hours of the stuff, Petro is qualified to make a judgement about what makes a good piece of public video.

"It's pretty hard to keep the viewer's attention for four minutes if you're just standing there doing nothing," Petro says. "It's attitude, personality; it's basically humour."

It might be a stretch for lip-synchers and their ilk to cash in their 15 minutes, but they're willing to try. Moy and Relf are going to continue making their videos. Otherwise, they'd be disappointing their fans.

"Our next song is Britney's Whoops I Did it Again," Moy says. "It's totally hot Hornsby. Most of it is in our house, and there are kitchen shots with Katy laying on the bench. There's a toilet scene but it's not dirty, it's classy. We're also taking some cues from the video itself. And I have a new wig."

Source: The Sydney Morning Herald