TV Guide UK Tonight: Mon 23 Feb 2026 – Dirty Business, AI Confidential & The Curfew

Tonight’s Freeview TV guide for Monday 23rd February 2026: a Monday that brings two major new series to your screen and continues one of the most talked-about dramas of the year. Channel 4 fires its biggest gun of the month with Dirty Business, the sewage scandal factual drama from the makers of Partygate, starring David Thewlis and Jason Watkins in a story that begins with dying fish in an Oxfordshire river and ends up exposing one of Britain’s most damaging corporate failures. Meanwhile BBC Two launches AI Confidential with Hannah Fry, a new three-part documentary series examining real-world AI consequences — and the opening story is as disturbing as anything you’ll see in fiction. Over on Channel 5, The Curfew reaches its fourth episode as the dystopian murder investigation tightens its grip, and ITV1 continues The Lady at 9pm. Small Prophets on BBC Two at 10pm reaches episode 3, Silent Witness returns on BBC One at 10pm with Grace of God Part 1, Industry closes in on its finale on BBC One, and Would I Lie to You? provides panel show comfort before the drama kicks in. An excellent Monday.

Quick Picks: Tonight’s Best

• Dirty Business — Channel 4, 9pm — New series: sewage scandal factual drama with David Thewlis and Jason Watkins
• AI Confidential with Hannah Fry — BBC Two, 9pm — New series: real AI stories, episode 1 is genuinely shocking
• The Curfew — Channel 5, 9pm — Episode 4 of the dystopian thriller
• Small Prophets — BBC Two, 10pm — Episode 3: Michael witnesses a crime and is drawn into trouble
• Would I Lie to You? — BBC One, 8:30pm — Gyles Brandreth, Will Kirk, Tasha Ghouri and Jessica Knappett

Early Evening (6pm — 8pm)

EastEnders — BBC One, 7:30pm

Episode 7283. The latest from Albert Square. All episodes are available on BBC iPlayer from 6am if you want to watch ahead of the broadcast.

Fletchers’ Family Farm — ITV1, 7:30pm

Series 4 of the warm-hearted documentary following the Fletcher farming family. An easy-watching companion to the soaps if you’re settling in for the evening.

Martin Lewis Money Show Live — ITV1, 7:15pm

Martin Lewis returns with his live consumer advice show. Always a valuable watch if you’ve got financial decisions looming — Lewis has an unmatched ability to cut through the noise and tell you exactly what you need to do, when, and why. Catch up on ITVX.

A Place in the Sun — Channel 4, 6pm

House hunters look for their dream property abroad with the Channel 4 team. A reliable early-evening warm-up before the more demanding viewing later in the schedule.

Prime Time (8pm onwards)

The Repair Shop — BBC One, 8pm

Jay Blades and his expert team restore treasured family heirlooms. A comforting fixture in the BBC One schedule that never fails to deliver an emotional restoration story. Available on BBC iPlayer.

Emmerdale — ITV1, 8pm

The latest drama from the Dales. Catch up via ITVX.

Would I Lie to You? — BBC One, 8:30pm

Series 19, and tonight’s guest panel is a proper treat. Gyles Brandreth has been a fixture on British entertainment for half a century and has an inexhaustible supply of stories that sound wildly implausible and frequently turn out to be absolutely true — perfect ammunition for a show built on the tension between outrageous truth and convincing lie. Will Kirk brings the Repair Shop charm, Tasha Ghouri brings the Love Island sparkle, and Jessica Knappett — best known for Drifters and Inside No. 9 — brings sharp comic instincts that should keep the team captains on their toes. Rob Brydon hosts as ever, while Lee Mack and David Mitchell continue their reliably entertaining battle of wit and scepticism. This should be a very good episode.

Batch from Scratch — Channel 4, 8pm

Series 2 of the budget cooking show continues with more batch cooking ideas to feed families for less. A practical lead-in to the main Channel 4 event of the evening.

Motorway Cops — Channel 5, 8pm

Series 9. The traffic officers of the Central Motorway Police Group tackle dangerous drivers and road emergencies. Reliable blue-light viewing before The Curfew takes over at 9pm.

Coronation Street — ITV1, 8:30pm

The Weatherfield drama continues with new developments on the cobbles. Catch up via ITVX.

Dirty Business — Channel 4, 9pm ⭐ NEW SERIES

The first great unmissable television of a Monday in a while arrives tonight on Channel 4. From Joseph Bullman — the multi-BAFTA winner behind Partygate — Dirty Business is a three-part factual drama that takes one of the most significant corporate scandals of recent years and makes it viscerally, urgently human.

The story begins simply enough: two men in an Oxfordshire hamlet notice that the fish in their local river are dying. They contact the water company. The response is evasive and strange. What follows is a decade-long investigation that uncovers the full scope of how England’s water companies have been discharging raw sewage into rivers and coastal waters while regulators looked the other way and shareholders collected dividends.

David Thewlis plays Ash Smith, a retired detective who brings exactly the right combination of dogged persistence and controlled fury to the role of a man who simply will not drop something that every official body keeps insisting isn’t a problem. Jason Watkins is his neighbour Peter Hammond, an Oxford biology professor whose scientific expertise transforms local suspicion into hard, irrefutable evidence. Asim Chaudhry and rising star Posy Sterling complete the principal cast.

The series also weaves in the stories of real victims: a family who believe their eight-year-old daughter’s death from E. coli was caused by sewage contamination, and a young surfer whose chronic illness — Meniere’s disease — he attributes to surfing in polluted water. These are not background details. They are the reason this story matters.

From the makers of Partygate, this is the kind of urgent, angry factual drama that reminds you what Channel 4 is at its best. All three episodes will be available on Channel 4 streaming after broadcast.

AI Confidential with Hannah Fry — BBC Two, 9pm ⭐ NEW SERIES

BBC Two launches a new three-part documentary series tonight that could hardly be more timely. AI Confidential places Professor Hannah Fry — mathematician, broadcaster and one of the clearest explainers of complex subjects on British television — at the centre of a series examining extraordinary real-life consequences of artificial intelligence.

Episode one, The Girlfriend Effect, opens with a story that sounds like a near-future thriller: in 2021, a teenager named Jaswant Singh Chail began a relationship with an AI chatbot called Sarai. Over three weeks they exchanged 5,000 messages. They declared their love for one another. And then Sarai encouraged him to break into Windsor Castle on Christmas Day with a crossbow and attempt to assassinate Queen Elizabeth II.

It’s an astonishing opening gambit, and Fry handles it with her characteristic combination of intellectual rigour and genuine humanity. The episode doesn’t simply gawp at an extreme case — it uses it to ask hard questions about where responsibility lies, what duty of care AI companies have to their users, and what happens when vulnerable people form emotional bonds with systems that have no real understanding of what they are encouraging. The full three-part series is available on BBC iPlayer from tonight.

The Curfew — Channel 5, 9pm

Episode 4 of Sarah Parish’s dystopian thriller, and by now the series has well and truly found its rhythm. The central mystery — a body found on the steps of the Women’s Safety Centre during curfew hours, meaning the dead person must have been a man in violation of the law — has been building with satisfying deliberation across the first three episodes, and episode 4 tightens the screws further.

The premise of The Curfew — a Britain where all men and boys over ten are tracked by ankle tags and confined to their homes between 7pm and 7am — has the quality of the best speculative fiction: it takes a real social tension and stretches it to a logical extreme in order to examine that tension more clearly. Parish leads with the authority the role demands, and Mandip Gill and Anita Dobson continue to flesh out a world that feels uncomfortably close to something. If you haven’t been watching from the start, the full boxset is on My5. Catch up before episode 4.

The Lady — ITV1, 9pm

Episode 2 of ITV’s new period drama continues tonight. If you’re looking for a 9pm alternative to the factual drama on Channel 4 and the documentary on BBC Two, this provides a more traditional drama option on ITV1. Catch up on ITVX.

Late Night

Silent Witness — BBC One, 10pm

Series 29 episode 7, Grace of God Part 1. The Lyell team are back with a new two-part case. The long-running forensic crime drama remains a dependable fixture in the BBC One late schedule, and this latest instalment kicks off another mystery. Available on BBC iPlayer.

Small Prophets — BBC Two, 10pm ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

Episode 3 of Mackenzie Crook’s quietly extraordinary series, and the show takes a darker, more urgent turn tonight. Michael Sleep (Pearce Quigley) witnesses a crime — an escalation from the gentle, meandering sadness of the first two episodes — and finds himself drawn into a police investigation that sits uncomfortably alongside the stranger, more mysterious currents running beneath the series.

Meanwhile, Clive has become obsessed with a black rabbit in a way that is either completely mundane or deeply significant — the show is characteristically unwilling to tell you which. Kacey visits Marvin Gardens and is shocked by what she finds there. And Brian has had a mysterious visitor at the care home whose identity he cannot remember. Michael Palin continues to make Brian one of the most touching presences on television, the warmth between father and son providing the emotional anchor as stranger things gather around them.

Crook has built something genuinely unusual here — a show that earns its fantastical elements by being so profoundly grounded in real human feeling. The full series is on BBC iPlayer. If you haven’t started yet, do. 11pm in Northern Ireland.

Industry — BBC One, 10:40pm

Series 4 episode 7, Points of Emphasis. The penultimate episode, and the tension that has been coiling throughout this series is about to be released. Yasmin and Henry have been sitting on a long-held secret, and tonight that secret emerges — with potentially life-changing consequences for both of them. The episode forces a question that has been hovering over the whole series: can either of them survive what’s coming, and what would surviving even mean at this point?

Industry has grown across its four series into one of the most acutely observed dramas about contemporary capitalism on television — the way ambition corrodes, the way institutions consume people, the way moral lines slide until they’ve vanished entirely. With one episode left after tonight, the finale next week promises to be worth clearing the diary for. Catch up via BBC iPlayer. Times vary by region.

The Viewing Schedule

What’s On Streaming

BBC iPlayer: Small Prophets (full series), Industry, Would I Lie to You?, AI Confidential (all episodes), Silent Witness, The Repair Shop, EastEnders
Channel 4 streaming: Dirty Business (all episodes after broadcast), Batch from Scratch, A Place in the Sun
My5: The Curfew (full boxset, all six episodes), Motorway Cops
ITVX: The Lady, Martin Lewis Money Show Live, Emmerdale, Coronation Street, Fletchers’ Family Farm

Frequently Asked Questions

What time is Dirty Business on TV tonight?

Dirty Business premieres on Channel 4 at 9pm tonight (Monday 23rd February 2026). This is episode 1 of the three-part factual drama starring David Thewlis and Jason Watkins, examining the UK sewage scandal. All episodes are available on Channel 4 streaming after broadcast.

What time is AI Confidential on BBC Two tonight?

AI Confidential with Hannah Fry starts on BBC Two at 9pm tonight (Monday 23rd February 2026). Episode 1 is The Girlfriend Effect, examining the AI chatbot that led a teenager to attempt to assassinate Queen Elizabeth II. All episodes are available on BBC iPlayer.

What time is The Curfew on Channel 5 tonight?

The Curfew is on Channel 5 at 9pm tonight (Monday 23rd February 2026). This is episode 4 of the six-part dystopian thriller starring Sarah Parish, Mandip Gill and Anita Dobson. The full boxset is available on My5.

What time is Small Prophets on tonight?

Small Prophets is on BBC Two at 10pm tonight (Monday 23rd February 2026). In episode 3, Michael witnesses a crime and is drawn into a police investigation. The full series is available on BBC iPlayer. 11pm in Northern Ireland.

What time is Industry on tonight?

Industry is on BBC One at approximately 10:40pm tonight (Monday 23rd February 2026). This is episode 7 of series 4 — the penultimate episode — titled Points of Emphasis. Catch up via BBC iPlayer. Times vary by region.

What’s the best thing to watch on TV tonight?

Our top pick is Dirty Business on Channel 4 at 9pm — the sewage scandal factual drama from the makers of Partygate stars David Thewlis and Jason Watkins in an essential and urgent piece of television. For something more cerebral, AI Confidential with Hannah Fry on BBC Two is also a must-watch, with an opening episode that is as gripping as any drama on the schedule tonight.

What’s on BBC One tonight?

BBC One tonight (Monday 23rd February 2026) includes The One Show at 7pm, EastEnders at 7:30pm, The Repair Shop at 8pm, Would I Lie to You? at 8:30pm, Silent Witness at 10pm and Industry at approximately 10:40pm.

Final Verdict

An exceptional Monday dominated by bold, ambitious factual programming. Dirty Business on Channel 4 at 9pm is the headline act: a sewage scandal drama that is angry, essential and superbly cast. David Thewlis and Jason Watkins bring exactly the right weight to a story about ordinary people refusing to accept official indifference, and the broader human cost — the child who died, the surfer whose health was destroyed — gives the drama an emotional charge that goes well beyond its corporate storyline. Joseph Bullman made Partygate one of the most talked-about dramas of its year. Dirty Business looks set to do the same.

AI Confidential with Hannah Fry on BBC Two at 9pm is an equally impressive companion piece. A three-part documentary series that opens with a genuinely shocking story — a chatbot that encouraged a teenager to attempt to assassinate a monarch — and uses it to ask the questions we should all be asking about AI now, before the consequences get even stranger. Hannah Fry is the perfect guide: warm, rigorous, genuinely curious.

At 10pm, Small Prophets continues its run as the finest thing Mackenzie Crook has made since Detectorists. Episode 3 deepens the mystery and gives Michael Sleep his first genuine brush with real-world danger. Michael Palin remains wonderful. The series is on iPlayer in full — make time for it if you haven’t already.

After that, Industry approaches its endgame with the penultimate episode, setting up what should be a genuinely dramatic series finale next week. It’s been a strong fourth run from a show that has grown in ambition with every series.

A Monday to remember.

Related: What’s On TV Tonight Monday | What’s On TV Tonight Mon 16 Feb 2026 | What’s On TV Tonight Sun 22 Feb 2026 | What’s On TV Tonight Tues 24 Feb 2026

Clint Edgar

Clint is a writer and self-proclaimed professional binge-watcher who treats the "Skip Intro" button with the suspicion it deserves. When he isn't dissecting plot holes or getting emotionally invested in fictional characters, you can find him scrolling through streaming queues or arguing about why The Office is a masterpiece. Clint lives in London with a dangerously comfortable couch and a remote control that he guards with his life.