Legend TV Guide: Listings, Schedule & What’s On Legend Tonight

Legend is what the old Horror Channel turned into after its 2022 rebrand: still free to air, still fond of a monster, but now handing most of its evenings to sci-fi, fantasy and action cinema. Sunday’s daytime hands the morning to five back-to-back episodes of Babylon 5 from 7am, then a Cold War spy thriller and three vintage westerns carry the schedule through into early evening. The night itself runs a Twilight Zone double bill either side of 8pm before the 9pm film headlines. Full breakdown below.

Legend Schedule: Sunday 16 August 2026 (Full Listings)

Here is the complete Legend schedule for Sunday 16 August 2026, on Freeview 41.

Overnight

Breakfast

Morning

Afternoon

Early evening

Primetime

Late night

What’s on Legend today

Overnight opens with Bruce Willis at 1:35am in Reprisal, a 2018 thriller in which a bank manager and his ex-cop neighbour go after the gang who killed a friend during a robbery. Adrien Brody follows at 3:30am in Unchained, a 2017 crime picture built around a warehouse siege that turns out to hide a bigger danger than the police outside. Legend goes off air just after 5am for a quarter-hour break, then runs teleshopping from 5:30am until programmes resume at 7am.

Babylon 5 then holds the whole morning, five episodes of series three back to back from 7am to midday, as Sheridan’s crew work through station sabotage, a hostile probe and the slow build towards war with the Shadows. At midday the schedule turns to Cold War espionage: The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, John le Carré’s 1965 adaptation with Richard Burton as an agent whose staged fall from grace is meant to fool the other side, only for him to find out how expendable he really is.

The westerns take over mid-afternoon. The Appaloosa follows at 2:10pm, Marlon Brando as a cowboy chasing the bandit chief who stole his prize stallion and, with it, his hopes of a stud farm. Dakota Incident rides in at 4:05pm, a stagecoach of mismatched passengers, among them a bank robber and a politician, forced to fend off a Cheyenne ambush in open desert. Arrowhead closes the afternoon at 5:50pm, Charlton Heston as a cavalry scout convinced the supposed peace talks with an Apache tribe are cover for the chief’s son to keep raiding, running through to the evening schedule.

Legend tonight — primetime and the evening schedule

Sunday night on Legend keeps to its usual shape: two half-hour episodes of vintage American television, then two feature-length films to close out the evening. Nothing here is new, but that has never really been the point.

The Twilight Zone double bill — Legend, 8pm and 8:30pm

The 8pm slot brings a season three episode built around a shopkeeper who claims to have seen visitors from another world, and gets nothing but disbelief for his trouble. Half an hour later, the second instalment turns to an ageing man who agrees to a procedure that promises to restore his youth, then has to weigh what that would cost him against the wife he’d be leaving behind. Rod Serling’s series is more than sixty years old and still runs here nightly at a sensible hour rather than being buried after midnight, which is more than most channels bother to do with material this old.

Man on a Ledge — Legend, 9pm

Sam Worthington gets the primetime film slot with this 2012 thriller, playing an escaped convict who climbs out onto a high-rise ledge and threatens to jump. What looks at first like a straightforward standoff with police turns out to be cover: his brother is using the chaos on the street below to pull off a heist elsewhere in the building. It’s a tighter, more mechanical thriller than Legend’s evening films sometimes are, closer to a heist plot wearing a hostage-drama disguise.

The Eiger Sanction — Legend, 11:05pm

Clint Eastwood directs and stars in this 1975 adventure, playing a retired assassin dragged back into the trade and sent after a target hidden among a team of mountaineers. The job forces him onto the Eiger itself, and the back half of the film turns into as much a climbing picture as a spy one. Eastwood did a fair amount of the rope work himself, and it shows in how the mountain sequences are shot. It’s a stranger, more physical film than its plot synopsis suggests.

What kind of shows are on Legend

Cult horror and its Horror Channel roots

Horror hasn’t been dropped, just demoted. Amicus and Hammer-adjacent anthologies still turn up, along with independent chillers and oddities like Horror Express, though these days they land in the afternoon or after midnight rather than at 9pm.

Sci-fi, fantasy and action films

Most evenings belong to genre cinema of a specific vintage: Van Damme, Steven Seagal, Dolph Lundgren, and further back, the fantasy adventures Ray Harryhausen animated. Film4 has the recent theatrical releases covered. Legend is working two or three decades earlier, and there is less competition for that ground than you would think.

Classic genre television

Very few channels still hand hours to vintage American genre TV. Legend does. The Twilight Zone runs as a nightly double bill, and Star Trek, Babylon 5 and The Six Million Dollar Man fill most weekday daytimes.

How to watch Legend

Channel numbers

Here’s where to find Legend across the main UK television platforms:

No subscription is required on any of them. Virgin Media and Freesat numbers can shift depending on your box and region, so trust your on-screen guide over this table if the two disagree.

Streaming online

Legend streams live and free through the WatchFreeUK app, available on Freeview Play, Freesat and YouView, and as a download on iOS, Android, Fire TV, Roku, and Samsung and LG smart TVs. No account or sign-up is required, which is more than can be said for most of its rivals. The catch-up section carries a selection of recently broadcast programmes, but licensing means not everything that airs stays available, and windows vary by title.

Legend Xtra and sister channels

Legend Xtra launched on 1 July 2022 as HorrorXtra and took its current name in a November 2023 refresh. Same broad mix of action, sci-fi and horror, free on Freeview channel 69, Sky 317, Virgin Media 171, Freesat 138 and Freely 51, with a +1 timeshift on Sky, Virgin Media and Freesat.

Both channels belong to the CBS AMC Networks UK Channels Partnership, a joint venture between Paramount Networks UK & Australia and AMC Networks International UK. True Crime and True Crime Xtra come from the same stable and sit alongside them in the WatchFreeUK app.

Frequently Asked Questions

What channel is Legend on Freeview?

Legend is on Freeview channel 41.

What’s on Legend tonight?

Tonight, Sunday 16 August 2026, the 9pm film is Man on a Ledge (2012), preceded by a Twilight Zone double bill at 8pm and 8:30pm, and followed at 11:05pm by The Eiger Sanction (1975).

Is Legend free to watch?

Yes, entirely. There are advert breaks during films and between programmes, but no subscription fee on any platform.

What was Legend called before?

It launched in 2004 as The Horror Channel, briefly became Zone Horror in 2006, reverted to Horror Channel in 2010, and became Legend on 30 June 2022.

Can I watch Legend online?

Yes, live and free through the WatchFreeUK app, no account needed.

Verdict

Legend is not chasing prestige and would look daft if it tried. What it gives instead is proper scheduled hours to material other free channels treat as filler. Horror Channel-era chillers hold the fringes of the schedule, but most nights now belong to the action cinema Van Damme and his contemporaries were making through the 1990s.

Sunday follows the same formula: Babylon 5 filling the morning, a Cold War spy thriller and a run of westerns through the afternoon, then a modern action film either side of the Twilight Zone double bill come the evening. Nobody is pretending this is a discovery channel. It knows exactly what it is.

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