Sex and the Sopranos

Sarah Jessica Parker as Carrie Bradshaw in 'Sex and the City 2'. Fans of the series and the movies can tread in her Manolo-clad footsteps with On Location Tours.

Fancy a cosmopolitan tour a la Carrie Bradshaw or titillation down the strip club favoured by Tony Soprano? Television tourism is whipping up a storm in New York and New Jersey, where fans can live as their heroes.

Twice a day, a Sex and the City bus fills up outside the posh Plaza Hotel, with gaggles of young women desperate to see filming locations and to shop, drink and eat like their small-screen heroines.

Travelling around Manhattan, the bus plays video clips of Carrie, Miranda, Charlotte and Samantha from the hit series, while a guide narrates anecdotes and vignettes about the show and the city.

For three-and-a-half hours, delighted fans blur the line between fiction and reality, taking photographs throughout.

Georgette Blau runs On Location Tours, which offers seven bus tours in New York devoted to cinema or television, including the Sex in the City itinerary.

One of the company's other popular draws is a five-hour bus tour through New Jersey for fans of cult TV show The Sopranos that starred the late James Gandolfini as the depressed mobster.

Guide Marc Baron, a former extra on the series, narrates the tour and even gives out little presents.

Highlights of the tour include Holsten's restaurant, where Gandolfini's character Tony Soprano ate during the last episode and the "Bada Bing" strip club, which in real life is called Satin Dolls.

Blau says that around 90,000 people go on her tours each year, half of them from overseas - most often Australia, Britain, France, Germany, Italy and Japan.

- AAP