That's when good neighbours become good adverts

And here's where Paul and Elle went on holiday ... a view of Sydney Opera House. Photograph: Greg Wood/AFP

The Australian tourism minister's response to a recent slump in visitor numbers from Japan is either a stroke of modern media genius or a deeply cynical development that bodes ill for our times in general and television in particular.

Fran Bailey's brainwave is to put an all-star Japanese cast into an Aussie soap. Bailey has been inspired (if that's the word) by what has become known in Australia as the "Neighbours effect". This is not, as you might guess, the invisible force that raises students from their beds at lunchtime. Rather, it is an increase in tourism from Britain, thought to be a direct result of the strange popularity over here of the soporific goings-on in Ramsay Street.

Putting aside the white-knuckle ride that is Australian soap opera itself, selling Australia to the Japanese through freshly created and custom-made drama is an unsettling new turn in TV history. Television has long had an impact in promoting cities and countries: Boston, Chicago, Vegas and the Los Angeles County beaches have achieved small-screen boosts via, in turn, Cheers, ER, the original CSI and Baywatch.

On this side of the Atlantic, even the seemingly spiralling murder rate did nothing to diminish the attraction of Inspector Morse's elegant, antique and sunlit Oxford. The crimes themselves were enticingly decorous and genteel. And many of us wouldn't even know the Forest of Dean existed, let alone its location, if not for The Singing Detective. But selling the scenery has always, until now, been incidental; the mystique of the setting is part and parcel of the story, not the raison d'etre of the show.

This strange new hybrid of soap and infomercial, in which Japanese actors will frolic and find love in Aussie-land - usually next to major national monuments and tourist sites - is in danger of missing both the point and the brilliance of TV storytelling by being so breathtakingly literal in its product placement. Placing a product within a scene is usually, at worst, a bit jarring. But arranging every single scene around - or rather as - the product?

At least the Australian Tourist Board's website with its wheedling slogan - "Where the bloody hell are you then?" - has a refreshing bluntness to it. This new notion is rather more insidious.