The Nightmares Next Door (C4); This World: Property To Die For (BBC2) - FAMILIES taking part in The Nightmares Next Door have one thing in common - you wouldn't want them as your neighbours.

There are the student party animals, the family with five dogs, another with tearaway kids, the ones who play their music at full volume, and the bossy busybody.

We've encountered them all before in other reality shows but C4 has gathered them together on the pretext of a psychological study. Why can't they be honest and admit it's another case of the exploitation of ordinary people for the entertainment of the rest of us.

The five families are spending four weeks living in a specially-constructed village in the middle of a field in Dorset. Dr George Erdos, senior lecturer in psychology at Newcastle University, wants to show that using psychological theory can turn bad neighbours into good ones.

The inevitable conflict ensued as the families began reverting to type. Having to share restricted water and electricity supplies causes rows. So does storing the food in one place. Screaming children, swearing mothers, binge-drinking students and dogs doing their doo-doo all over the place make life in the Big Brother house look like a monastic retreat.

One dog-lover defended her canine criminals against the tearaway Jones children: "Dogs are little people, just like children - you don't have children put down if they're naughty, do they? So why my dogs?".

The whole programme is as distressing to watch as living next door to bad neighbours. At least they all have a roof over their head. Some people in Russia aren't so lucky as we saw in Property To Die For.

Even Phil and Kirsty would be hard pushed to make sense of property laws in post-Communist Russia. They are ever-changing and leave home-owners dangerously exposed.

Developers and bureaucrats get rich on dodgy property deals as ordinary people and little businessmen lose out under pressure, not only from bad laws but also violent threats. The millions of Russians who became home-owners for the first time in the 1990s are finding that owning property can seriously damage your health.

Villages are flattened to make way for tower blocks. Alexei watched as his home was flattened. As his broken leg was in plaster, the demolition team thoughtfully got him a chair to sit on to witness the destruction of his house. He now lives in his car as a new home wasn't part of the project.

Rozalia Korodzievskaya and daughter Emily have run the first private restaurant in Moscow for 17 years. Not for much longer after finding the official paperwork for their purchase is a scam. A theatre director employs a bodyguard following threats to his family, the result of speaking out about plans to build a nightclub in the city's public park. The owner of a concrete factory discovers that the tax office that froze his bank account for alleged failure to pay taxes is the same office behind the takeover of his business. His lawyer disappeared and was found 100 miles away, barely conscious.

This is reality TV, not those nightmare neighbours.

Published: 20/07/2005