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. Thursday night pairs a Coen brothers documentary with one of their own films, which is the sort of scheduling BBC Four does better than anyone.

BBC Four Schedule: Thursday 13 August 2026 (Full Listings)

Here is the complete BBC Four schedule for Thursday 13 August 2026, on Freeview 9.

Overnight

Morning

Early evening

Primetime

Late night

BBC Four tonight — primetime and the evening schedule

Here’s the BBC Four primetime line-up for tonight, Thursday 13 August 2026.

This is BBC Four — BBC Four, 6:58pm

Two minutes of ident and a caption before the evening’s own schedule takes over.

Villages by the Sea — BBC Four, 7pm

Ben Robinson picks up series four in Port Carlisle, a Solway Firth port once pitched as a rival to Liverpool’s docks and now known mainly for what’s left of its harbour wall.

Wainwright Walks — BBC Four, 7:30pm

Julia Bradbury brings the current run to a close on Scafell Pike, racing the light to reach England’s highest summit, 978 metres up.

Operation Mincemeat — BBC Four, 8pm

Worth a note before switching on: this is Ben Macintyre’s documentary, built from surviving witnesses, not the 2021 Colin Firth drama that shares its title. It covers the same wartime deception, a fabricated identity built around a dead body to mislead German intelligence, but from the people who were actually there.

The Coen Brothers Story — BBC Four, 9pm

Actors and past collaborators talk through Joel and Ethan Coen’s career, a decent primer for the film that follows an hour later.

Inside Llewyn Davis — BBC Four, 10pm

One of the Coens’ own films slots straight in after the documentary about them: a struggling folk singer grinding through a cold week in 1961 New York, the sort of small, wintry story the pair do particularly well.

Shaft — BBC Four, 11:40pm

Richard Roundtree’s 1971 original closes the night, still the version by which every Shaft remake gets measured.

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. There’s no music strand tonight. Before this evening’s schedule even starts, the small hours carry a bat roost documentary at 12:45am and repeats of Wainwright Walks, Villages by the Sea and Mary Beard’s Ultimate Rome, and the channel goes dark again at 3:45am until 7pm.

Tonight’s mix: wartime history, film and a walk up Scafell Pike

Tonight is closer to the channel’s usual mixed bag than a themed evening. Ben Macintyre’s Operation Mincemeat documentary at 8pm runs into The Coen Brothers Story at 9pm, and the archive then supplies two films to close out the night: Inside Llewyn Davis, one of the Coens’ own, and the 1971 original Shaft. Earlier, Wainwright Walks reaches the end of its current run with Julia Bradbury on Scafell Pike.

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 a more typical spread: a wartime documentary, a film-industry retrospective and two films from the archive. Operation Mincemeat at 8pm is the one worth staying in for, and it’s worth knowing before pressing play that it’s Ben Macintyre’s documentary rather than the Colin Firth drama of the same name.

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