BB FANS

City of Dreams is how the Thuringian town of Artern is billed in a new entertainment series about to hit German television screens. They have agreed to allow the makers of the German reality-television series Big Brother into the town to film a fly-on-the-wall documentary series. The first programme to bring the misery of real unemployment into viewers' homes once a week will be aired early next month. Artern is typical of the hundreds of small towns in eastern Germany that have suffered economic decline since the collapse of communism 13 years ago. Endemol, the production company that launched Big Brother on German television two years ago, is adamant that its City of Dreams project is a far more serious undertaking than its predecessor. "We want to get away from the Big Brother image. City of Dreams does not intend to expose or exploit Artern's inhabitants. We want to help them," Mr Brandt insists. Mr Brandt hopes City of Dreams will gradually attain the status of programmes like Coronation Street by "accompanying people who are interesting enough to have their lives recorded down the years, yet normal enough to enable viewers to identify with them."