BBC Four (BBC 4) TV Guide: Listings, Schedule & What’s On BBC Four Tonight

BBC Four is the BBC’s home for arts, culture, history, music and archive documentary, and unlike almost everything else on the electronic programme guide it simply isn’t there during the day. Nothing before 7pm. The schedule opens on the short “This is BBC Four” ident and runs to the small hours, and CBeebies takes the channel back at 6am. It sits on Freeview channel 9, carries no advertising because the licence fee pays for it, and puts more or less everything it broadcasts onto BBC iPlayer afterwards. Tonight, Monday 10 August 2026, the evening centres on Andrew Graham-Dixon’s The Art of Spain at 8pm, framed by two shorter documentary strands beforehand and a run of archive quiz shows and arts programmes that carry the schedule past midnight. Full breakdown below.

BBC Four Schedule: Monday 10 August 2026 (Full Listings)

Here is the complete BBC Four schedule for Monday 10 August 2026, on Freeview 9.

BBC Four tonight — primetime and the evening schedule

Here’s the BBC Four primetime line-up for tonight, Monday 10 August 2026.

This is BBC Four — BBC Four, 6:58pm

The channel comes on air at 6:58pm with the short “This is BBC Four” ident, two minutes of continuity before the evening’s first programme.

The Architecture the Railways Built — BBC Four, 7pm

Tim Dunn opens series 1 with a look at Down Street, the disused Mayfair tube station that played a tactical role during the Second World War, before touring Rotterdam Centraal with the station’s own designer.

The Flying Gardener — BBC Four, 7:40pm

Chris Beardshaw takes to the air for another aerial tour of Britain’s gardens, hovering this time over the Cotswolds to pick out examples of vertical planting worked into its castle grounds and village plots.

The Art of Spain — BBC Four, 8pm

Andrew Graham-Dixon reaches episode two of his history of Spanish art, tracing how a brutal empire also produced a Golden Age of painting across the 16th and 17th centuries. It’s also the longest single strand of the evening, running a full hour where most of what surrounds it runs 20 to 30 minutes.

Mastermind: 1977 — BBC Four, 9pm

An archive edition hosted by Magnus Magnusson from Reading University, with specialist subjects ranging from the Alps to the Old Testament.

Call My Bluff — BBC Four, 9:30pm

Robert Robinson chairs a vintage edition of the word game, with Frank Muir and Patrick Campbell captaining teams that include Joanna Lumley and Russell Harty.

The Sky at Night — BBC Four, 10pm

Brian Cox joins the team to look at what the James Webb Space Telescope has revealed about black holes.

The Golden Age of Spanish Painting: Omnibus — BBC Four, 10:30pm

Humphrey Burton’s 1976 survey of Spanish painting, first broadcast to coincide with a Royal Academy exhibition of the same name, gets an outing here as a single extended edition.

One Hundred Great Paintings: The Magic of Light — Zurbarán — BBC Four, 11:20pm

Edwin Mullins devotes a quarter-hour to a single canvas in this short archive strand: Francisco de Zurbarán’s 17th-century still life of lemons, oranges and a single rose.

Britain’s Lost Waterlands: Escape to Swallows and Amazons Country — BBC Four, 11:35pm

The evening closes in the Lake District, tracing the scenery that gave Arthur Ransome the settings for his children’s classic Swallows and Amazons.

What kind of shows are on BBC Four

Documentaries, history and the natural history archive

This is the backbone of the schedule. Attenborough series like Life on Earth sit alongside Natural World instalments and long-running science and history strands. Very little of it is new. Most has already had at least one outing on BBC One or BBC Two, and BBC Four is where it airs again a few years later.

Music archive: Top of the Pops and BBC Four Sessions

On plenty of nights the schedule turns to music once the evening’s main strand is done, with vintage Top of the Pops and Old Grey Whistle Test repeats among the regulars and the odd BBC Four Sessions recording running into the small hours. Some of those performances aren’t shown anywhere else on television. Tonight it’s a two-part Arena profile of Harold Pinter that fills the after-midnight slot, followed at 1:55am by the National Youth Orchestra’s Proms performance of Berlioz’s Symphonie Fantastique.

Classic sitcom repeats

Two 1990s BBC sitcoms back to back is standard practice here, and you’ll find that pairing on BBC Four far more often than on BBC One or BBC Two, where the same shows would have to justify a peak slot.

How to watch BBC Four

Channel numbers

Here’s where to find BBC Four across the main UK television platforms:

BBC Four is free to watch on all of the above, though you’ll need a valid UK TV licence to watch it live, the same as any other BBC channel. Virgin Media and Freesat numbers can shift slightly by region, so your on-screen guide is the definitive source if these don’t quite match.

Streaming online

BBC Four streams live and free through BBC iPlayer, on smart TVs, phones, tablets, games consoles and in a browser at bbc.co.uk/iplayer. You’ll need a free BBC account to sign in. Once you’re in, BBC Four sits with the other BBC channels under the “Channels” tab, and its archive series are browsable separately.

BBC Four and BBC iPlayer

The live broadcast runs on iPlayer in full, so anything between 7pm and closedown can be watched as it goes out or picked up shortly after. The archive is the more useful half, though. It reaches a long way past whatever fits into one evening: full Attenborough box sets, older documentary strands that stopped getting a repeat slot years ago, music collections that only surface on air at two in the morning. If you like the idea of BBC Four more than you like remembering to switch it on at 9pm, that is where to start.

Frequently asked questions

Does BBC Four have adverts?

No. It’s funded by the licence fee, so there are no ad breaks anywhere in the schedule.

Is BBC Four free to watch?

There’s no separate subscription for BBC Four itself, but you do need a TV licence to watch it live, or to watch most of it back on iPlayer, the same as any other BBC channel.

What is the relationship between BBC Four and BBC Three?

Shared history rather than a shared schedule. BBC Three closed as a broadcast channel in 2016 and spent six years online-only before returning to linear TV in February 2022. That return reshuffled channel numbers on some platforms; on Virgin Media, the two now sit next to each other at 107 and 108. Over roughly the same stretch BBC Four stopped commissioning much new original programming and moved towards repeats and archive. The nightly live broadcast never went away.

Verdict

BBC Four is one of the better-value channels on British free television, provided you know what you’re going there for. Most nights, nothing on it is new. What’s on it is a decent share of the best things the BBC has ever made, given a proper repeat run years after it first went out.

Tonight is arts documentary and archive quiz shows, which is BBC Four doing what it exists for. Andrew Graham-Dixon’s The Art of Spain at 8pm is the centrepiece, and the pairing of Mastermind: 1977 and Call My Bluff either side of 9pm is the stretch worth staying up for.

Related: What’s On TV Tonight | BBC One TV Guide | BBC iPlayer Guide | Films on TV This Week