TV Guide UK Tonight: Fri 11 Sept 2026 – Celebrity MasterChef, The Rainmaker & Gogglebox

Published: 2 September 2026

Friday 11 September 2026. BBC One closes out Celebrity MasterChef’s semi-finals with an ingredient auction at 8pm, ITV1 and Channel 4 both put a big 9pm show on (The Rainmaker and Gogglebox), and Joe Lycett reopens his real pub for live television at 10pm. Today also marks 25 years since the 9/11 attacks, and Sky History carries the one confirmed same-day film about it, 102 Minutes Inside the Towers, at 9pm. EastEnders doesn’t air on Fridays.

Quick Picks: Tonight’s Best

• Celebrity MasterChef BBC One, 8pm. The last semi-final, decided by an ingredient auction.
• The Rainmaker ITV1, 9pm. Rudy’s digging starts turning up answers nobody wanted.
• Gogglebox Channel 4, 9pm. Britain’s sofa critics, back for another Friday.
• 102 Minutes Inside the Towers Sky History, 9pm. The confirmed 9/11 25th-anniversary broadcast tonight.
• EastEnders is not on tonight — it returns Monday at 7.30pm.

Early Evening

Sister Boniface Mysteries – BBC One, 2pm

Today’s repeat sends Sister Boniface into geekier territory than usual: a fan convention for the fictional cult sci-fi show Professor Y, complete with a washed-up former star still trading on faded glory and a showrunner who treats his own fans like an inconvenience. That contempt catches up with him when he vanishes from his hotel room, leaving nothing behind but a bloodied patch of carpet. Lorna Watson’s gentle sleuth has to work out whether the culprit loved the show too much or hated its creator more. Full series on iPlayer.

Horrible Science: Big Bang Prom – CBBC, 5.25pm

A kids’ science special dressed up as a concert, running through pieces from Holst’s The Planets to the Star Wars score while explaining the physics behind each one. Albert Einstein and Marie Curie host, loosely, with a running gag about whether a fictional mad scientist gatecrashes the stage.

The Travelling Auctioneers – BBC One, 7.30pm

The regular daytime auction format continues, following dealers around attics, antiques centres and house clearances hunting for anything worth taking to sale.

BBC Proms – BBC Four, 8pm

A reunion Prom on BBC Four for three of the biggest names to come out of BBC Young Musician: Sheku Kanneh-Mason, who won the competition outright in 2016, alongside runners-up Jess Gillam and Ben Goldscheider. All three have gone on to genuinely major careers, and here they premiere a new Triple Concerto written for them by Sakari Oramo‘s BBC Symphony Orchestra collaborator Gwilym Simcock. Britten’s Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra and Dvořák’s New World Symphony round out the programme, with Oramo conducting and Georgia Mann presenting.

Celebrity MasterChef – BBC One, 8pm ⭐

This is the pick tonight. The last of the semi-finals doesn’t bother with a straightforward cook-off — instead the six remaining celebrities bid for hidden ingredients under cloches, using minutes of their own cooking time as the currency. Bid too much and you’ve got a brilliant ingredient and no time left to do anything clever with it; bid too little and you’re stuck garnishing a plate around whatever nobody else wanted.

It’s a genuinely sharp piece of format design, the kind of pressure that exposes who can actually think under stress rather than who just cooks well when nobody’s rushing them. The results go in front of restaurant critics Tom Parker Bowles, Leyla Kazim and Jesse Burgess, the last of whom built a food-review career on exactly this kind of rapid-fire judgement through his Topjaw channel and Apple TV’s Knife Edge. Whoever survives tonight goes through to the final.

Emmerdale – ITV1, 8pm

The village keeps its regular Friday slot, running straight into Coronation Street at 8.30pm to close out ITV1’s soap hour for the week.

Our Great Yorkshire Life – Channel 5, 8pm

On Channel 5, Gaynor Faye confronts a lifelong fear of horses, dating back to being thrown from one as a child, with the help of a holistic horse therapist and a suspiciously patient pony. Elsewhere: a Dales furniture restorer takes on eight oak louvres for a church bell tower, a look back at Castle Howard, and a Halifax farmer walks his sheep to market.

You’re Killing Me – U&Drama, 8pm

Every TV detective eventually witnesses something through a pair of binoculars they wish they hadn’t, and this is that story. Writer Andi thinks she’s seen a murder across the bay from the cabin where she and Allie are supposedly working on a book. Allie is politely sceptical right up until somebody tries to poison them both with carbon monoxide, at which point the wild theory stops sounding quite so wild.

Doc Martin – ITV3, 8pm

A back-to-back double bill of the Cornish GP dramedy, running at 8pm and 9pm, Martin Clunes as prickly as ever against the Portwenn backdrop.

Jimmy Doherty’s Big Bear Rescue – Channel 4, 8pm

Jimmy and the team take on another rescue at the sanctuary, giving a new arrival the space, care and patience it needs before it can join the rest of the group. Channel 4 at 8pm.

Prime Time

Gogglebox – Channel 4, 9pm

The pitch has never really changed and doesn’t need to: real households, on real sofas, saying what everybody else is thinking about the week’s television but usually keeps to themselves. It works precisely because so little else on TV now gets watched communally — most households are on different platforms at different times, so this is one of the few programmes still doing the job a shared living room used to do. Reliable, funny, and somehow never stale.

The Rainmaker – ITV1, 9pm

Rudy Baylor is getting better at his job faster than he’s comfortable with. Tonight he starts noticing the small, overlooked details in Donny Ray’s case, the kind of thing his hard-to-please boss Bruiser genuinely rates him for. Meanwhile his girlfriend Sarah is being steered, gently and deliberately, by Leo, the ambitious boss of rival firm Tinley Britt, and Rudy is too preoccupied with the case to clock it. ITV1 at 9pm, full series on ITVX.

Gardeners’ World – BBC Two, 9pm

Sue Kent takes on fuchsia gall mite, a sap-sucking pest small enough to be invisible until your plants start looking wrong, and makes a solid case for growing Swiss chard once the summer harvest has cleared space. Adam Frost has practical advice on capturing rainwater after a summer that tested everyone’s watering can, and Frances Tophill visits a Somerset garden built to echo the landscape around it. BBC Two at 9pm.

102 Minutes Inside the Towers – Sky History, 9pm

Today is the 25th anniversary of the September 11 attacks, and this is the one confirmed same-day broadcast marking it on UK television. It’s built from the testimony of people who were actually inside the World Trade Center that morning — the ones who got out, through some combination of instinct, help from strangers and luck that never felt like luck at the time. There’s no dramatic reconstruction and no narrator smoothing the edges, just accounts of a building swaying, a lobby full of falling paper, and the particular kind of memory that doesn’t fade with 25 years. It repeats at 12.55am for anyone who can’t manage it live. Sober, difficult, and worth the hour.

Would I Lie to You? – BBC One, 9pm

The regular panel format returns, Rob Brydon keeping order as guests try to sell Lee Mack and David Mitchell an outlandish true story and a convincing lie in the same breath. Mrs Brown’s Boys follows at 9.30pm.

Mrs Brown’s Boys – BBC One, 9.30pm

The sitcom keeps its regular Friday half-hour, following straight on from Would I Lie to You?

Late Night

Live from The Lycett Arms – Channel 4, 10pm

Joe Lycett’s actual pub in Hoxton opens for its one live hour of the week again, and this week’s episode is billed to bring Lenny Henry in for a trial shift behind the bar, with comedian Joanne McNally among the regulars propping up the bar itself. The appeal hasn’t changed: it’s genuinely live, which means genuinely unpredictable, in a TV landscape where almost nothing else still is. Whatever goes wrong, goes wrong on air.

Live at the Apollo – BBC Two, 10pm

A fresh half-hour from the Hammersmith stage, in its usual Friday-night home on BBC Two.

Buddy Holly Night – BBC Four, from 10.30pm

Ninety years since his birth, and BBC Four marks it properly with two archive documentaries rather than one. First, a 1985 Arena film built around contributions from his old backing band the Crickets, contemporaries the Everly Brothers, and fans including Paul McCartney and Keith Richards, both of whom rate him as a genuine formative influence rather than just an early rock and roll name. It’s followed by 1993’s Peggy Sue, Tales of Rock ‘n’ Roll, in which Peggy Sue Gerron Rackham — the real woman behind the song — talks through what it was actually like to be Buddy Holly’s muse.

RuPaul’s Drag Race UK – BBC One, 10.40pm

BBC One’s later showing of the current series, picking up a night or so after its BBC Three premiere for anyone who missed it the first time round.

Club Zero – BBC Two, 11pm

Mia Wasikowska has always been selective to the point of near-invisibility since Alice in Wonderland made her briefly one of the biggest young actors around, and this 2023 film is exactly the kind of strange, small project that explains why. She plays Miss Novak, a teacher whose “conscious eating” philosophy — extreme restriction, dressed up as self-improvement — starts pulling a group of pupils toward something closer to a cult. Writer-director Jessica Hausner keeps it hovering somewhere between satire and outright horror without ever committing fully to either, which is unsettling in exactly the way she intends. Certificate 18.

Sport

Day three of England’s third Test against Pakistan is live from Edgbaston on Sky Sports Cricket from mid-morning, with play scheduled 11am to 6pm and free-to-air highlights on BBC Four at 7pm. Across the Channel, the Solheim Cup gets under way from 6.30am on Sky Sports, Europe taking on the USA in the opening day of women’s team golf from Bernardus Golf in the Netherlands. Closer to home, BBC Two opens a new event tonight at 7pm: Athletics: Ultimate Championships from Budapest, a biennial competition designed to fill the gap in years without a World Championship or Olympics, bringing together a genuinely strong field for a night that isn’t attached to either.

The Viewing Schedule

What’s On Streaming

• BBC iPlayer: Celebrity MasterChef, Sister Boniface Mysteries, Gardeners’ World, BBC Proms, Would I Lie to You?, Club Zero
• ITVX: The Rainmaker (full series), Emmerdale, Coronation Street
• Channel 4 streaming: Gogglebox, Live from The Lycett Arms, Jimmy Doherty’s Big Bear Rescue
• NOW: 102 Minutes Inside the Towers

Frequently Asked Questions

Is EastEnders on tonight (Friday 11 September 2026)?

No. EastEnders airs Monday to Thursday on BBC One at 7.30pm, so Thursday’s episode was the last of the week and it returns Monday 14 September at 7.30pm. Friday is its regular night off.

What time is Celebrity MasterChef on tonight?

Celebrity MasterChef is on BBC One at 8pm. It’s the last of the semi-finals, decided by an ingredient auction in which the six remaining celebrities bid using cooking time as currency, judged by Tom Parker Bowles, Leyla Kazim and Jesse Burgess.

Is there 9/11 anniversary programming on TV tonight?

There’s one confirmed same-day broadcast: 102 Minutes Inside the Towers on Sky History at 9pm, repeated at 12.55am, marking 25 years since the attacks with first-hand accounts from survivors. Channel 4’s, Channel 5’s and BBC One’s own anniversary documentaries have already aired earlier in the week.

What’s the best thing to watch on TV tonight (Friday 11 September 2026)?

Celebrity MasterChef’s ingredient auction on BBC One at 8pm is the most inventive hour of the night, with The Rainmaker and Gogglebox both worth catching at 9pm and Live from The Lycett Arms giving Channel 4 a genuine live-television risk at 10pm.

What live sport is on TV tonight: Friday 11 September 2026?

England play Pakistan in the third Test’s day three at Edgbaston, live on Sky Sports Cricket from mid-morning with BBC Four highlights at 7pm. The Solheim Cup begins in the Netherlands from 6.30am on Sky Sports, and BBC Two has the opening night of the new Athletics: Ultimate Championships at 7pm.

What’s on ITV1 tonight?

ITV1’s Friday soap hour runs Emmerdale at 8pm and Coronation Street at 8.30pm, followed by The Rainmaker at 9pm, in which Rudy’s digging into Donny Ray’s case starts turning up uncomfortable answers.

What channel is The Rainmaker on?

The Rainmaker is on ITV1 at 9pm, adapted from the John Grisham novel. Rookie lawyer Rudy Baylor, played by Milo Callaghan, keeps finding the small details his boss Bruiser didn’t expect him to notice. The full series streams on ITVX.

What time does Live from The Lycett Arms start?

Live from The Lycett Arms is on Channel 4 at 10pm. Joe Lycett’s Hoxton pub opens live for exactly one hour, with this week’s episode billed to include Lenny Henry behind the bar.

What film is on TV tonight?

Club Zero is on BBC Two at 11pm, an unsettling 2023 satire starring Mia Wasikowska as a teacher whose extreme “conscious eating” philosophy edges towards a starvation cult. Certificate 18.

Are Emmerdale and Coronation Street on tonight?

Yes, both air as usual on ITV1: Emmerdale at 8pm and Coronation Street at 8.30pm, ahead of The Rainmaker at 9pm.

Final Verdict

Celebrity MasterChef‘s ingredient auction is the sharpest thing BBC One puts up all night, and a genuinely clever way to settle a semi-final. The Rainmaker and Gogglebox give 9pm two solid, different options, and Live from The Lycett Arms is still the one hour of the week where anything can actually go wrong on screen. On a day marking 25 years since 9/11, 102 Minutes Inside the Towers on Sky History is the one broadcast that deserves proper attention rather than background viewing. EastEnders returns Monday at 7.30pm.

Related: What’s On TV Tonight Friday | What’s On TV Tonight Thurs 10 Sept 2026 | What’s On TV Tonight Saturday