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

Published: 20 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, Monday 21 September 2026, opens on nature and fine art: Summer: Earth’s Seasonal Secrets at 7pm and Britain’s Lost Masterpieces: Tatton Park at 8pm, before a run of archive favourites, Mastermind: 1977 and Call My Bluff, from 9pm. The Yayoi Kusama documentary Kusama: Infinity – Arena takes 10pm, and the evening closes on Romancing the Stone: The Golden Ages of British Sculpture at 11:10pm. Full breakdown below.

BBC Four Schedule: Monday 21 September 2026 (Full Listings)

Here is the complete BBC Four schedule for Monday 21 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, Monday 21 September 2026.

This is BBC Four — BBC Four, 6:58pm

The short ident that opens every evening’s broadcast, running a couple of minutes ahead of the schedule proper.

Summer: Earth’s Seasonal Secrets — BBC Four, 7pm

Andrew Scott narrates this nature documentary on how the long, hot days of summer push wildlife to its limits, from overheated penguins to colour-changing lizards (series 1, episode 1).

Britain’s Lost Masterpieces: Tatton Park — BBC Four, 8pm

Bendor Grosvenor and Emma Dabiri dig into the provenance of an unidentified Italian physician’s portrait held at the Cheshire stately home, tracing its authorship as far as Rome and Florence (series 5, episode 2).

Mastermind: 1977 — BBC Four, 9pm

Magnus Magnusson puts contenders through their paces in an archive edition of the quiz recorded in 1977, specialist subjects ranging from the Alps to children’s literature.

Call My Bluff — BBC Four, 9:30pm

An archive edition of the word-definition panel game from the show’s original run, part of BBC Four’s occasional dip into surviving episodes from the vaults.

Kusama: Infinity – Arena — BBC Four, 10pm

This Arena strand profile follows artist Yayoi Kusama from a childhood in provincial Japan, through sexism, racism and mental illness, to becoming one of the world’s best-selling living artists.

Romancing the Stone: The Golden Ages of British Sculpture — BBC Four, 11:10pm

Alastair Sooke closes out his survey of Britain’s sculptural heritage, the concluding instalment of a three-part series (episode 3 of 3).

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 it’s the main event rather than a late addition, covered in full below.

Tonight’s mix: nature and art into an archive quiz run

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. The evening opens on nature and fine art, a Summer documentary at 7pm and Britain’s Lost Masterpieces at 8pm, before turning to a run of archive favourites, Mastermind: 1977 and Call My Bluff, from 9pm. A Yayoi Kusama profile takes 10pm, and the schedule closes with the final part of a three-part sculpture documentary at 11:10pm.

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 nature documentary and an art-detective story carry the first half of the evening before it turns to archive quiz shows. Mastermind: 1977 and Call My Bluff run from 9pm, a Yayoi Kusama profile takes 10pm, and a sculpture documentary closes out the night just after 11pm. Nothing live is being shown, so it suits anyone happy to settle into a slower-paced evening rather than someone chasing a single big event.

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