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, Tuesday 11 August 2026, the evening opens with two short documentary strands before a run of classic sitcom repeats, then Ardal O’Hanlon’s archaeology documentary Tomb Raider and a feature on the history of Japan’s kamikaze pilots carry the schedule to close on The Sky at Night. Full breakdown below.

BBC Four Schedule: Tuesday 11 August 2026 (Full Listings)

Here is the complete BBC Four schedule for Tuesday 11 August 2026, on Freeview 9.

BBC Four tonight — primetime and the evening schedule

Here’s the BBC Four primetime line-up for tonight, Tuesday 11 August 2026.

The Architecture the Railways Built — BBC Four, 7pm

The evening opens with the second instalment of this series on the engineering behind the world’s railways. Tim Dunn heads to Wales to look at the Ffestiniog line, built originally to carry slate down from the mountains to the coast, then crosses to Amsterdam Centraal for a look at Dutch railway design.

The Flying Gardener — BBC Four, 7:40pm

Chris Beardshaw traces the journeys of the Scottish plant hunters who travelled the world, often at real personal risk, to bring back species that now sit unremarked in British gardens and parks.

To the Manor Born — BBC Four, 7:55pm

Series one continues with Audrey moving out of Grantleigh Manor for good. She’d hoped the new owner would keep the estate running the way it always had, and finds out otherwise once she learns more about his background.

Keeping Up Appearances — BBC Four, 8:30pm

Series four opens with Richard dragged into one of Hyacinth’s schemes, this time to turn him into a Frosticle executive by way of a round of golf he never asked to play.

Ardal O’Hanlon: Tomb Raider — BBC Four, 9pm

Ardal O’Hanlon digs into a 1930s archaeological expedition that set out to establish who the first people in Ireland actually were, and uses it to work through his own questions about Irish identity.

Kamikaze: An Untold History — BBC Four, 10pm

Japanese and American veterans give first-hand accounts of the kamikaze attacks of the Second World War, an offensive that killed thousands of the pilots who carried it out as well as the Allied personnel it targeted.

The Sky at Night — BBC Four, 11:30pm

The long-running astronomy programme closes out the evening with its usual mix of observation and explanation, a fixture on BBC Four’s schedule for decades.

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 there’s no music strand after The Sky at Night; the schedule stays on science and documentary instead, with The Wildest Weather in the Universe at midnight and Beautiful Equations at 1am, before The Flying Gardener and Ardal O’Hanlon: Tomb Raider repeat in the small hours.

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 classic sitcom and documentary, which is BBC Four doing what it exists for. To the Manor Born and Keeping Up Appearances either side of 8pm are the comfortable middle of the evening, and Ardal O’Hanlon: Tomb Raider at 9pm is the one worth staying up for.

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