JUDGING by the reactions of some London-dwelling BBC folk when asked to relocate to Media City, Greater Manchester is the very definition of the back of beyond. Why, they probably don’t even have electricity there. As for one’s chances of fresh fennel or a decent sourdough, forget it.

As you will see from Manctopia: Billion Pound Property Boom (BBC2, Tuesday, 9pm), it has all been a ruse, a fiction spread by Mancunians to stop any more southerners moving there.

Up north west (or down south west if you are from these parts), is where it is all happening. The population of Manchester is set to double in the next five years, which means a lot of houses are required. Great for property developers, not so much for locals being priced out of the area.

Tim Heatley is in the former category. He wants to build 1000 flats and a hotel in a part of the city that is currently the red light district. Going by the detritus in one patch of wasteland, business is very much booming. Not the sort of area in which you would buy a penthouse flat for £1.4 million (or rent it for 8K a month). But cleaning up the place, and rebranding it “Piccadilly East” will, hopes Heatley, help to seal the deal. It is a gamble, though, a £450 million one, but if it comes off the development could be worth a billion. Not bad for someone who is 39-years-old.

Christina Hughes, above, bar some stroke of massive luck, will not be in the market for one of the flash new flats. A single mother of two, she is being evicted from her rented three-bed semi in Eccles.

Never missed a rent payment nor left a bill unpaid in her life: the landlord just needs the property back.

With a couple of weeks to go before eviction, she adds her name to the waiting list for affordable housing. There are 97,000 people in the queue already.

Elsewhere in the first of four films we meet a homeless young man dreaming of getting out of a hostel, and a fashion stylist who needs a place with enough room to house her designer shoe collection. It’s the usual juxtaposition of extremes so beloved of documentary makers, but there are surprising crossovers too. Heatley, for example, organises a concert to raise money to help homeless people. There’s also an estate agent, Jennie, who has fond memories of her younger, Hacienda days. “It’s flats now,” she says of the birthplace of the “Madchester” scene. “Like everything else.” A fascinating dig into what it means to gentrify an area, and what it takes to make it a success.

Not that we are painfully shallow and obsessed with money in these parts, but the next pick of the week is Secrets of the Luxury Super Yachts (Channel 5, Friday, 8pm). I blame the sublime Succession (Sky Atlantic), and the episode that took place on the yacht of media mogul Logan Roy (Brian Cox), for my sudden interest in floating palaces.

The Roy yacht turns out to be a pokey little affair compared to some of the boats on display here. First stop is the yacht show in Barcelona, where an average vessel with three pools, a helicopter launch pad, an aquarium and room for 18-crew, will set you back £70 million.

If you don’t want to buy there’s always John Caudwell’s yacht. The billionaire businessman and philanthropist behind Phones 4u rents his boat out for £600,000 a week, and that does not include food, drink, or fuel. It is called the Titania, which is begging for trouble on the misspelling front if you ask me, but there we are.

The film is built around a super-duper yacht being tailor made for a Russian buyer who goes only by the name of “Mr G”. We never see Mr G, or hear from him, but from interviews with the yacht’s interior designers we learn he has a thing for burnt orange (as do I, when should I arrive?).

Between updates on Mr G’s order we meet a yacht salesman who likes to make his own cheesy videos and manages to out- Partridge Alan Partridge, and a chief stewardess who says her job is “to see everything but say nothing”.

There is the inevitable Scot – Lord, we get everywhere – in Daniel Murphy, the chief engineer of an Italian yacht where his wife, Bianca, is the chef. He showed us round their quarters, which didn’t take long as it was a tiny cabin with bunkbeds.

Though happy on this boat, Bianca had cooked for some rum sorts down the years, the kind of folk who thought nothing of calling her at 3am for a cheeseburger. Just goes to show: you can have all the money in the world, enough to purchase a super yacht, but you can’t buy class.

Finally, after five years’ work and wait, Mr G’s yacht was ready for handover. The message came back – he liked it. Phew. We can all sleep easy tonight.