‘I have dreamed about this for a long time … to be able to give somebody something of this magnitude,” says Marco, the knight in shining armour at the centre of Get a House for Free (8th August, 9pm, Channel 4). Marco is a property investor and landlord from Preston, Lancashire, who made his fortune buying and selling houses. Now he wants to give away a fully furnished, three-bedrom flat worth £120K.

Several centuries ago, Marco might have been observed in frock coat and powdered wig lobbing gold coins out of a horse-drawn carriage at toothless paupers. But these days a rich man can find a different kind of absolution by parading his charitable nature on TV while embarking on an all-important journey of self-discovery. And so, in the same conscience-easing mould as The Secret Millionaire, in which tycoons go undercover in the name of philanthropy, here Marco gets to audition people on the breadline to decide which of them is most deserving of his munificence.

Marco, we are told via a solemn voiceover, has a global portfolio worth in the region of £25m. Meanwhile, a typical home in Preston costs eight times the average salary, and one in five people are living in social housing. So who will win over Marco with their tale of hardship? Will it be single mum Holly, 18, who lives alone with a newborn baby in a cramped flat flecked with mould, or partially sighted Jo, struggling with sky-high rent and a demanding yet low-paid job? Or will it be the family of refugees from Syria – a father and his two adult sons – hoping to find political asylum, forbidden from working, and thus reduced to sleeping under bridges and on church floors?

This is, supposedly, the noble face of contemporary TV, one that highlights the plight of impoverished people and sees one person striving to make another person’s life better. What could be wrong with that? Well, let’s see. There’s Marco – who made his millions from the property boom – sympathising with victims of the housing crisis being crippled by impossible prices and soaring rents, apparently not noticing that he is part of the problem. There’s the spectacle of him leafing through the applications with his mum and explaining: “I’m looking for people that have really good values. One of the values is [a] work ethic.” In other words, the right kind of poor person, not the feckless kind, who presumably deserve everything they get. And there’s the profound discomfort of watching applicants hauled into the flat in question to gasp at the pretty fixtures and mentally arrange their furniture, despite the fact that most will never get the chance to live there.

It would be immensely satisfying to report that Marco is a cartoonishly loathsome millionaire, a cigar-chomping meld of Alan Sugar and the Duke of Westminster. In fact he’s gentle, unflashy and clearly an empathic sort who, it turns out, endured severe financial hardship as a child. All of which makes his decision to parade his largesse in front of the entire nation that much more bewildering. Get a House for Free is, of course, a triumphant concept for the eventual recipient of a shiny new flat, and for Marco who gets to look like the Messiah. But there’s no getting away from the fact that this is poverty porn dressed up as altruism, in which the losers vastly outnumber the winners.