GREAT! Romance TV Guide: Listings, Schedule & What’s On GREAT! Romance Tonight

GREAT! Romance is the UK’s free-to-air home for Hallmark-style romance films, tucked away on Freeview 52. Narrative Entertainment picked it up in 2021 as part of Sony Pictures Television’s old UK free-to-air portfolio, ran it for a couple of years as GREAT! Movies Classic, then switched it to romance only in January 2023. Tonight’s four primetime films begin from 5:45pm, and the channel’s usual pattern holds: each title gets a short “Good News on GREAT!” bulletin partway through, followed by an immediate repeat play before the next film starts.

GREAT! Romance Schedule: Friday 14 August 2026 (Full Listings)

Here is the complete GREAT! Romance schedule for Friday 14 August 2026, on Freeview 52.

Overnight

Breakfast

Morning

Afternoon

Early evening

Primetime

Late night

What’s on GREAT! Romance today

Daytime keeps to the same rhythm as the evening: a film plays, a short “Good News on GREAT!” bulletin interrupts it partway through, then the film picks back up before the next title starts. Accidentally in Love opens the day’s proper run at 8:10am, Lexi Giovagnoli and David Witts as a couple who meet in London days before she’s due to fly home, then find each other again six years later in the States. Their co-star Hamish Briggs also wrote and directed.

Love on Retreat takes over at 10:15am, Ansley Gordon as a beauty-brand employee packed off on a company retreat in Miami who ends up falling for her boss’s brother, played by Jonathan Stoddard. Just My Type follows from 12:10pm, Bethany Joy Lenz as a pop culture journalist who lands the interview of her career and finds the subject’s boss harder to ignore than the assignment.

Secret Millionaire runs from 2pm, an industrialist’s heir hiding who he really is from the woman leading a protest against his father’s firm. Love in Bloom closes out the afternoon from 3:50pm, Susie Abromeit as a Chicago florist whose sister’s Australian wedding turns into more than a flower-arranging job, running through to 5:45pm when Love, Game, Match opens tonight’s films.

GREAT! Romance tonight — primetime and the evening schedule

Here’s the GREAT! Romance primetime line-up for tonight, Friday 14 August 2026. As usual, each film gets a short “Good News on GREAT!” bulletin partway through and then repeats in full before the next one starts.

Love, Game, Match — GREAT! Romance, 5:45pm

Cristine Prosperi stars as an economics teacher whose class assignment spirals out of her control: the winning pupils set up a working matchmaking service and talk her into building her own profile. She ends up paired off against a tennis coach played by Dale Moss, testing whether an algorithm can out-guess her own judgement.

The Love Gala — GREAT! Romance, 7:45pm

Lesa Wilson plays a woman handed the job of running her mother’s annual Garden Gala, only to find the botanical garden has a new manager with very different ideas about how the event should look. What starts as a scheduling clash turns into something closer to a working partnership.

Just for Showmance — GREAT! Romance, 9:45pm

A career slump pushes Katie McCarty‘s character into signing up for a reality series that marries contestants off to strangers live on air. Playing along for the cameras gets complicated once the marriage stops feeling like a stunt.

Home for Harvest — GREAT! Romance, 11:45pm

Brigitte Kingsley plays a travel writer sent back, against her wishes, to the small hometown she left after a painful breakup. An old flame is still around, but so is somebody new, and the film takes its time deciding which one matters more.

What kind of films are on GREAT! Romance

Made-for-TV romance and Hallmark-style movies

Most of the schedule is exactly what the name promises: romantic comedies and dramas made for television rather than cinema, a great many of them produced for the American Hallmark and Lifetime markets and licensed over here afterwards. Cake shops, small-town festivals, mistaken identities, matchmakers who fall for their own clients. That repetition is the appeal rather than a flaw. Nobody switching on at three on a weekday afternoon wants to be surprised.

Christmas and seasonal takeovers

From October through to early January the channel goes almost entirely festive, with some titles shared with the network’s seasonal GREAT! Christmas strand. The rest of the year defaults to spring and summer settings, weddings and plots that require somebody to get on a plane.

Faith-based and heavier drama

A handful of the films are more serious than the rest, often adapted from novels or true stories, and willing to sit with grief or faith rather than hurry past it. Same genre, heavier going.

How to watch GREAT! Romance

Channel numbers

Here’s where to find GREAT! Romance across the main UK television platforms:

All of the above are free, with no subscription required. Freesat is the gap: the whole GREAT! network was withdrawn from that platform in 2024, so Freesat viewers need Freeview, Sky, Virgin Media or the Great! Player app instead. Virgin Media numbers shift slightly by region, so trust your on-screen guide over ours if the two disagree.

Streaming online

GREAT! Romance streams free through the Great! Player app, available on iOS, Android, Amazon Fire TV, Samsung and LG smart TVs, and at great-player.com. There is no account to create and no sign-up form to fill in. You open the app and the channel is there, paid for by ad breaks rather than by you, which is rarer among UK streaming apps than it ought to be.

GREAT! sister channels

Four channels sit under the GREAT! banner, all free-to-air, all inherited from the Sony Pictures Television UK portfolio Narrative Entertainment bought in 2021.

• GREAT! TV (Freeview 34): general entertainment, classic sitcoms and drama repeats
• GREAT! Movies (Freeview 50): films across every genre, not just romance
• GREAT! Action (Freeview 42): action, adventure and war films

A fifth, GREAT! Christmas, borrows part of the network’s schedule each winter and hands it back in the new year.

Frequently Asked Questions

What’s on GREAT! Romance tonight?

Romance films run back to back through the evening. Love, Game, Match opens the run at 5:45pm, The Love Gala follows at 7:45pm, Just for Showmance at 9:45pm, and Home for Harvest closes the night at 11:45pm. Full times are in the schedule table above.

What channel is GREAT! Romance on?

Freeview channel 52, Sky channel 319, and Virgin Media channel 424. It’s currently unavailable through Freesat’s official channel line-up.

Is GREAT! Romance free to watch?

Yes, entirely free to air with no subscription, on Freeview, Sky, Virgin Media and through the Great! Player app. There are ad breaks during films, as with any commercially funded channel.

Can I watch GREAT! Romance online for free?

Yes, via the Great! Player app or great-player.com, with no account or sign-up needed.

Verdict

GREAT! Romance does one job and does it consistently: comfort viewing with guaranteed happy endings, and enough turnover that regulars rarely see the same film twice in a fortnight. It will never trouble anyone looking for ambitious television. Watch two in a row and the tics start to show. The cake shops. The small towns forever in need of saving. The third-act misunderstanding that one honest conversation would have cleared up in a minute.

Tonight mixes its usual tropes rather than repeating one. Love, Game, Match puts its lead to work on somebody else’s love life before her own catches up with her, via a matchmaking app her own pupils built. The Love Gala runs the workplace-rivals-forced-together plot instead, an event planner and a stubborn new venue manager clashing over how her mother’s party should look. Just for Showmance flips the formula by putting the humiliation on camera, a reality series that marries a celebrity off to a stranger for the ratings. Home for Harvest is the one worth catching if only one slot fits, running the old-flame-meets-new-flame plot with a bit more room to breathe than the rest.

Related: Film4 TV Guide | Freeview Channel Guide | Films on TV This Week