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

Published: 9 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, Thursday 10 September 2026, Fred Dibnah’s Building of Britain opens the evening at 7pm, followed by Villages by the Sea at 7:30pm and The Hunt for Lady Olive and the German Submarine at 8pm. Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid takes 9pm, then a Robert Redford career retrospective leads into a screening of the Agatha Christie mystery The Mirror Crack’d from 11:25pm. Full breakdown below.

BBC Four Schedule: Thursday 10 September 2026 (Full Listings)

Here is the complete BBC Four schedule for Thursday 10 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, Thursday 10 September 2026.

This is BBC Four — BBC Four, 6:58pm

The two-minute This is BBC Four ident opens the channel, two minutes ahead of the evening’s first proper programme.

Fred Dibnah’s Building of Britain — BBC Four, 7pm

Fred Dibnah’s Building of Britain (series 1, episode 4) gets the evening under way at 7pm.

Villages by the Sea — BBC Four, 7:30pm

Villages by the Sea follows at 7:30pm with series 4, episode 10.

The Hunt for Lady Olive and the German Submarine — BBC Four, 8pm

The Hunt for Lady Olive and the German Submarine fills the 8pm hour, a documentary investigation into a 1917 U-boat encounter.

Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid — BBC Four, 9pm

The 1969 Western Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, with Paul Newman and Robert Redford, runs from 9pm.

Robert Redford: Talking Pictures — BBC Four, 10:45pm

Robert Redford: Talking Pictures (series 1, episode 28) follows the film with a look back at the actor’s own career.

The Mirror Crack’d — BBC Four, 11:25pm

The Agatha Christie mystery The Mirror Crack’d, with Angela Lansbury as Miss Marple, closes out the night from 11:25pm.

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 nights — the evening runs history documentary into archive drama instead, covered in full below.

Tonight’s mix: engineering, classic sitcom, then archive history

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 Fred Dibnah’s Building of Britain at 7pm and Villages by the Sea at 7:30pm, then The Hunt for Lady Olive and the German Submarine takes 8pm and the 1969 Western Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid follows at 9pm. From 10:45pm the shape of the evening turns to film biography and archive mystery: a Robert Redford career retrospective leads into a screening of The Mirror Crack’d, 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 Fred Dibnah’s Building of Britain and Villages by the Sea, before The Hunt for Lady Olive and the German Submarine and the 1969 Western Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid take the 8pm and 9pm hours. Robert Redford: Talking Pictures, screening from 10:45pm ahead of The Mirror Crack’d, is the sort of double bill that would struggle to find a slot anywhere else on terrestrial television. There’s no live sport of any kind on the channel tonight, so it suits anyone after a quieter documentary-and-archive-film evening rather than someone chasing a single big booking.

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