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

Published: 25 August 2026

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. A “programmes start at 7.00pm” holding card fills the schedule from first thing in the morning through the whole afternoon; the channel actually opens two minutes early, at 6:58pm, with the short This is BBC Four ident, and CBeebies takes it 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, Wednesday 26 August 2026, the evening builds towards its real hook: three straight hours given over to Rome. Villages by the Sea opens primetime at 7pm, followed by Canal Boat Diaries at 7:30pm, then Rome: A History of the Eternal City at 8pm, the second of three parts. Mary Beard’s Ultimate Rome: Empire without Limit takes the 9pm slot, the concluding part of her series, on why and how the empire fell, before two episodes of I, Claudius from 10pm carry the story through Caligula’s assassination to Claudius’s unlikely rise as emperor. The Australian Wars closes the night at 11:50pm. There’s no film and no live sport on BBC Four tonight. Full breakdown below.

BBC Four Schedule: Wednesday 26 August 2026 (Full Listings)

Here is the complete BBC Four schedule for Wednesday 26 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, Wednesday 26 August 2026.

This is BBC Four — BBC Four, 6:58pm

A short This is BBC Four continuity card bridges the channel into the evening, running two minutes before the schedule proper begins.

Villages by the Sea — BBC Four, 7pm

Villages by the Sea opens the evening’s line-up, its fifth outing of the current run continuing the strand’s look at coastal communities around Britain and the stories that shaped them.

Canal Boat Diaries — BBC Four, 7:30pm

The 7:30pm hour belongs to Canal Boat Diaries (series 4, episode 3).

Rome: A History of the Eternal City — BBC Four, 8pm

Rome: A History of the Eternal City takes the 8pm slot (series 1, episode 2 of 3), opening three straight hours of Roman history.

Mary Beard’s Ultimate Rome: Empire without Limit — BBC Four, 9pm

At 9pm, it’s the concluding part of Mary Beard’s Ultimate Rome: Empire without Limit (series 1, episode 4 of 4), on why and how the empire fell. This is the night’s lead item.

I, Claudius — BBC Four, 10pm

The 10pm hour belongs to I, Claudius (series 1, episode 9 of 12, “Hail Who?”).

I, Claudius — BBC Four, 10:55pm

I, Claudius returns at 10:55pm with its tenth instalment, “Fool’s Luck”, picking up the palace chaos left by the previous episode’s murderous coup: the tyrant on the throne is cut down by his own guard, and his stammering, unlikely uncle finds himself hauled off to be made emperor almost against his will.

The Australian Wars — BBC Four, 11:50pm

The night closes at 11:50pm with the second part of The Australian Wars, the documentary series tracing the sustained conflict between Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples and British colonial forces.

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 isn’t one of those music nights: the schedule runs three straight hours on Rome instead, covered in full below.

Tonight’s mix: an off-air day and a Rome-led evening

There’s no BBC Four to speak of before 6:58pm. The tail of the overnight schedule is really the previous evening running on past midnight: a repeat of The Flying Gardener at 12:55am, The Secret Genius of Plants at 1:10am and How the Celts Saved Britain at 2:05am close out the previous night’s run, followed by a short This is BBC Four ident at 3:05am. A “programmes start at 7.00pm” holding card takes over at 5:30am and fills the rest of the night, the whole morning and the entire afternoon, until the two-minute ident reopens the channel, a little ahead of schedule, at 6:58pm. From there the evening opens with Villages by the Sea and Canal Boat Diaries before three straight hours on Rome take over from 8pm: Rome: A History of the Eternal City, the concluding part of Mary Beard’s Ultimate Rome, and two episodes of I, Claudius that carry the story through to Caligula’s assassination and Claudius’s accession. There’s no film and no live sport on the channel tonight.

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 fits that pattern closely: nothing until 6:58pm, then Villages by the Sea and Canal Boat Diaries before the evening’s actual draw arrives at 8pm. Three straight hours on Rome — Rome: A History of the Eternal City, the concluding part of Mary Beard’s Ultimate Rome, and two episodes of I, Claudius that carry the story through to Caligula’s assassination and Claudius’s accession — is exactly the kind of themed run BBC Four builds an evening around, rather than padding out the back half with unrelated filler. There’s no film and no live sport tonight, so it’s one for viewers who came for Rome rather than anyone flicking through for background noise.

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