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

Published: 5 September 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, Sunday 6 September 2026, a factual opener gives way to the Proms and then archive drama: Bridging the Gap: How the Severn Bridge Was Built at 7pm, Martha Argerich’s Proms performance at 8pm, and a short film on playwright Shelagh Delaney at 9:45pm. Two archive films close the night, each preceded by a brief introduction: A Taste of Honey from 10pm and Under Milk Wood from 11:45pm. Full breakdown below.

BBC Four Schedule: Sunday 6 September 2026 (Full Listings)

Here is the complete BBC Four schedule for Sunday 6 September 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, Sunday 6 September 2026.

Bridging the Gap: How the Severn Bridge Was Built — BBC Four, 7pm

The channel opens its evening proper at 7pm (the This is BBC Four ident runs two minutes ahead of it) with the first episode of a new series on the engineering behind the Severn crossings.

Martha Argerich at the Proms — BBC Four, 8pm

The pianist’s Proms performance takes the 8pm hour, part of this year’s Proms season on the channel.

Shelagh Delaney’s Salford — BBC Four, 9:45pm

A brief profile of the playwright, ahead of the film she’s best known for writing.

A Taste of Honey — BBC Four, 10pm

Peter Egan introduces the 1961 film at 10pm, and it runs from 10:15pm — Shelagh Delaney’s stage play about a working-class Salford girl, adapted for the screen the same year it premiered.

Under Milk Wood — BBC Four, 11:45pm

Sian Phillips sets up Dylan Thomas’s radio drama at 11:45pm, with the film itself running from 11:55pm to close the night.

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 is one of those nights from early on: once the two Proms items clear at 7:40pm, the rest of primetime is given over to four half-hours of Top of the Pops and a Bee Gees double, covered in full below.

Tonight’s mix: engineering, the Proms, then archive drama

There’s no BBC Four to speak of before 6:58pm. A “programmes start at 7.00pm” holding card runs in blocks from 5:30am through the entire day, and the channel doesn’t reopen until the two-minute This is BBC Four ident, a little ahead of its own schedule, at 6:58pm. There’s no live sport on BBC Four tonight. The evening opens with a new series on the Severn crossings at 7pm, then Martha Argerich’s Proms performance at 8pm and a short profile of Shelagh Delaney at 9:45pm. From 10pm the shape of the evening turns to archive film, each title preceded by a brief introduction: A Taste of Honey, then Under Milk Wood from 11:55pm, keeping the channel on air past midnight.

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 a new documentary on the Severn crossings, an hour of Proms piano from Martha Argerich, and a brief look at Shelagh Delaney’s life before the evening settles into archive drama. Both closing films get a short introduction from an actor connected to them — Peter Egan ahead of A Taste of Honey, Sian Phillips ahead of Under Milk Wood — a nice touch that a straight repeat wouldn’t bother with. There’s no live sport of any kind on the channel tonight, so it suits anyone after a quieter arts-and-drama evening rather than someone chasing a single big booking.

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