TV Guide UK Tonight: Mon 23 Mar 2026 – Gone (Series Finale), MasterChef: the Professionals & Clash of the Superpowers

Published: 18 March 2026

Monday nights have become reliable television territory, and this one has more going on than most. The headliner is Gone reaching its series finale at 9pm on ITV1 — six weeks of George Kay’s carefully constructed thriller now arriving at its conclusion, with Eve Myles and David Morrissey finally facing the question the whole series has been building to. At the same time on BBC One, MasterChef: the Professionals enters finals week with four chefs cooking for 27 of the best in the business at the Goring Hotel in London. And on BBC Two, Clash of the Superpowers: America vs China launches — a major new documentary from Norma Percy, who has spent three decades making the definitive behind-the-scenes political series on BBC Two. Don’t let that 9pm clash catch you out; at least two of those three are worth setting something to record.

Quick Picks: Tonight’s Best

• Gone (Series Finale) ⭐ — ITV1, 9pm — Six weeks, and it all ends tonight. Eve Myles has been superb throughout
• Clash of the Superpowers: America vs China — BBC Two, 9pm — Norma Percy’s new documentary. This is the serious watch of the night
• MasterChef: the Professionals — BBC One, 9pm — Finals week at the Goring. The standard right now is absurd
• EastEnders — BBC One, 7:30pm — The Square in its Monday slot. Catch it before the 9pm pile-up
• Coronation Street — ITV1, 8pm — Hour-long Monday episode on Weatherfield’s cobbles
• Rooster — Sky Comedy, 10pm — Steve Carell in HR meetings. The campus comedy that keeps delivering

Early Evening

EastEnders – BBC One, 7:30pm

The Square’s Monday evening slot, and tonight’s episode arrives with some pressure building in various corners of Walford. EastEnders has been in a strong run of form heading into spring, with several storylines reaching the kind of momentum that makes Monday night a decent starting point for the week. If you’ve been keeping up, you know what’s at stake. If you haven’t, BBC iPlayer has the full week’s episodes waiting. Catch up via BBC iPlayer.

Mastermind & University Challenge – BBC Two, 8pm & 8:30pm

The Monday evening BBC Two double of general knowledge. Tonight’s Mastermind includes a specialist subject on Clint Eastwood westerns, which is one of those topics where a genuine expert will make it look very easy and anyone bluffing will get found out immediately. University Challenge follows at 8:30pm with two teams competing for a semi-final place. Clive Myrie hosts Mastermind; Amol Rajan hosts University Challenge. Back-to-back, forty minutes of shouting answers at the screen. Catch up via BBC iPlayer.

Batch from Scratch: Cooking for Less – Channel 4, 8pm

Joe Swash and Suzanne Mulholland — better known as the Batch Lady — are back with another pair of candidates whose relationship with food has got away from them. Nathan and Matt have built their lives around fitness and gym culture, which turns out to have made their diets considerably worse rather than better: six separate shopping trips on some days, no plan, no prep. The transformation by the end involves frittata and five different chicken meals in the freezer, which sounds modest until you realise that is a full working week of meals sorted on a Sunday afternoon. Catch up via Channel 4 streaming.

Dom Chinea’s Cornish Workshop – U&Yesterday, 8pm

Dom and Maria have been plotting a pond on their Cornish land for a while, and tonight is when the plan gets properly underway. In a separate thread, Dom joins his friend Sam Lovell from Shed and Buried for a session of drifting — controlled sliding in a car — which is either great fun or mildly terrifying depending on your perspective. There is also some rusty machinery to deal with, because there always is. Catch up via U.

Coronation Street – ITV1, 8pm

A Monday hour-long episode in Weatherfield. Coronation Street has been running multiple threads simultaneously this spring, and Monday’s episodes tend to move the bigger storylines along rather than reset them. The soap has been in confident form and tonight’s hour should give several of the ongoing plots some room to breathe. Catch up via ITVX.

Prime Time: 9pm

⭐ Gone (Series Finale) – ITV1, 9pm

This is what six weeks has been building to. Gone was always a thriller with a specific interest in something more complicated than whodunnit: it wanted to examine what happens inside a marriage that erodes one partner’s agency so gradually that neither party can identify the exact moment it began. George Kay — who wrote Lupin, Hijack and The Long Shadow — is the kind of writer who uses genre as a vehicle for character observation rather than mechanical plotting, and that quality has been the defining thing about this series.

DS Annie Cassidy (Eve Myles) has spent six episodes walking the difficult line between investigating Michael Polly (David Morrissey) and supporting his family as their liaison officer. Her remit has been pulled in two directions constantly, and the series has used that tension rather than resolving it. Tonight, Michael has produced a handwritten note acknowledging responsibility for Sarah’s death. The question is what that note actually means — admission, yes, but of what? Murder, or something else entirely?

Annie, who has been moving between certainty and doubt throughout, arrives at the finale no longer sure of her original read on Michael. Morrissey has been very good at playing a man who could be guilty or could be broken, and the script has given him the ambiguity to sustain that all the way to the end. Eve Myles has anchored it. The full series is on ITVX.

MasterChef: the Professionals – BBC One, 9pm

Finals week, and the Goring Hotel in London provides the stage for what may be the most pressurised challenge this series has produced. Four chefs. Twenty-seven of the finest working in Britain and Ireland — 36 Michelin stars between them sitting in the dining room. Marcus Wareing, Monica Galetti and Matt Tebbutt are judging. There is nowhere to hide and no margin for a bad plate.

The three chefs who make the strongest impression tonight will travel to Atelier Moessmer in Italy’s Tyrol tomorrow — a restaurant run by Norbert Niederkofler, who holds three Michelin stars and has spent years developing an approach to gastronomy rooted entirely in alpine ingredients and zero waste. He’ll give them a masterclass that will inform what they cook in Thursday’s final. Tonight is the filtering stage. Four go in. Three come out. Catch up via BBC iPlayer.

Clash of the Superpowers: America vs China – BBC Two, 9pm (New Series)

Norma Percy has a filmography that amounts to a kind of parallel political history of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries: The Death of Yugoslavia, Israel and the Arabs, Putin and the West. What she does — and nobody does it better — is find the people who were physically present at the moments that mattered and get them to speak on camera about what actually happened. Not press releases or official accounts. The room version.

Tonight’s first episode covers the period from 2017 to 2022: Donald Trump’s arrival in Washington and the immediate recalibration of the US relationship with China. The trade war years, the accusation that China had to be made to pay, Xi Jinping’s response, and what all of this looked like from inside both governments. Boris Johnson is one of the insiders who speaks here, alongside figures from the diplomatic and political world on both sides. Part two follows. Both episodes are already on BBC iPlayer, so there’s no need to wait. Catch up via BBC iPlayer.

The Hunt: Prey vs Predator – Channel 4, 9pm

The second episode of Channel 4’s survival game. Ten strangers in a large piece of woodland, divided into hunters and the hunted. The prey try to accumulate money through challenges; the predators risk elimination if they can’t catch someone and force a role reversal. The format’s tension comes from the fact that the roles aren’t fixed — the prey have agency, and the predators are not necessarily the most physically capable people in the group. Catch up via Channel 4 streaming.

Late Night

Rooster – Sky Comedy, 10pm

Steve Carell’s writer-in-residence Greg manages to end up in two separate HR meetings in the space of one episode, which is some kind of record even for a man demonstrably unsuited to human interaction. The first follows his attempt to tell a student she is his “white whale” — deploying the Moby-Dick usage with complete sincerity and absolutely zero awareness of how it sounds. The second arises from a failed double high-five, which apparently registers as a physical boundary violation under the college’s code of conduct. The series has been consistent about the fact that Greg’s difficulties are not satirical commentary — the show clearly likes its characters, including the students — and that warmth is what separates it from American campus comedies that use generational tension as a punchline. Catch up via Now.

Trying – BBC One, 10:40pm & 11:10pm

Double bill, and the situation is shifting. Jason and Nikki are about to hear the words they’ve been waiting for — Mum and Dad, spoken by the children they’re hoping to adopt. Jason slides into the role more smoothly than Nikki does, which is its own source of friction in a show that has always been better than its premise suggests. A chance encounter tonight complicates what had looked like a settled trajectory. Darren Boyd is back as Scott, the deeply absurd posturing friend who has always been one of the show’s better running jokes. Two episodes tonight on BBC One. Catch up via BBC iPlayer.

The Unseen Alistair Cooke – BBC Four, 10pm

A portrait of the broadcaster drawn partly from home footage that hasn’t been shown publicly before — including material involving Charlie Chaplin and Paulette Goddard. Cooke’s Letter from America ran on BBC Radio 4 from 1946 to 2004, which is the kind of stat that requires a moment’s pause. For fifty-eight years he provided a weekly account of American life for a British audience. The personal footage gives a different dimension to the public figure. Catch up via BBC iPlayer.

Sport

Tennis: Miami Open — Day seven at Hard Rock Stadium, Miami. Live on Sky Sports Main Event and Sky Sports Tennis from 3pm.

Cycling: Tour of Catalunya — Stage one of the Tour de Catalunya, 172.7km from Sant Feliu de Guíxols. Live on TNT Sports 1 from 2:15pm.

TGL Golf — Finals Series opening match from Palm Beach, Florida. On Sky Sports Golf at 1am (overnight into Tuesday). A Sky Sports subscription required.

The Viewing Schedule

What’s On Streaming

BBC iPlayer: MasterChef: the Professionals, Clash of the Superpowers: America vs China (both parts), EastEnders, Mastermind, University Challenge, Trying, Just One Thing, The Unseen Alistair Cooke
ITVX: Gone (full series), Coronation Street
Channel 4 streaming: Batch from Scratch: Cooking for Less, The Hunt: Prey vs Predator
Now: Rooster (Sky Comedy)
Freeview Play: Shed and Buried: Classic Cars (Quest)
Sky Sports: Miami Open tennis, TGL Golf

Frequently Asked Questions

Is EastEnders on tonight Monday 23 March 2026?

Yes — EastEnders is on BBC One at 7:30pm tonight. The soap runs Monday to Thursday in its regular evening slot. Catch up on all recent episodes via BBC iPlayer.

What time is the Gone series finale on tonight?

Gone wraps up with its series finale at 9pm on ITV1 tonight (Monday 23 March 2026). It’s the sixth and final episode of George Kay’s thriller, with Eve Myles as DS Annie Cassidy and David Morrissey as Michael Polly. The complete series is on ITVX.

What time is MasterChef the Professionals on tonight?

MasterChef: the Professionals is on BBC One at 9pm tonight (Monday 23 March 2026). It’s finals week, with four chefs cooking for 27 of the UK and Ireland’s top chefs at the Goring Hotel in London. The final is on Thursday at 8pm. Catch up via BBC iPlayer.

What is Clash of the Superpowers on BBC Two tonight?

Clash of the Superpowers: America vs China is a new two-part documentary from Norma Percy (the producer behind The Death of Yugoslavia and Putin and the West), starting at 9pm on BBC Two tonight. It covers the US-China relationship from 2017 to 2022, with insiders including Boris Johnson speaking on camera. Both episodes are already on BBC iPlayer.

What time is Coronation Street on tonight?

Coronation Street is on ITV1 at 8pm tonight (Monday 23 March 2026) in its standard hour-long Monday slot. Catch up via ITVX.

What’s on BBC One tonight Monday 23 March 2026?

BBC One tonight has EastEnders at 7:30pm, MasterChef: the Professionals at 9pm (finals week), and a double bill of Trying from around 10:40pm and 11:10pm.

Is there live sport on TV today?

Yes. The Miami Open tennis is on Sky Sports Main Event from 3pm (day seven at Hard Rock Stadium). The Tour of Catalunya cycling gets underway with stage one on TNT Sports 1 from 2:15pm — a 172.7km route from Sant Feliu de Guíxols. TGL Golf’s Finals Series opener is on Sky Sports Golf at 1am overnight.

Final Verdict

Tonight’s problem is that everything worth watching is on at once. The Gone series finale on ITV1 at 9pm is the obvious first claim on your attention — it has earned its conclusion and George Kay’s writing has been the best thing about a very good ITV thriller. If you’ve been following it, you’re not going to miss the last episode.

But Clash of the Superpowers on BBC Two at the same time is one of those documentaries that comes along rarely. Norma Percy doesn’t make programme series — she makes primary historical documents. Part one launches tonight and both parts are already on iPlayer, so the choice of watch order is yours.

MasterChef: the Professionals at 9pm on BBC One is quietly having its best week of the series. Twenty-seven Michelin stars watching four chefs cook in the Goring Hotel is a pressure environment that makes for seriously good television. Thursday’s final won’t disappoint.

Record at least two of the three. The iPlayer has the rest.

Related: What’s On TV Tonight Sunday 22 Mar 2026 | TV Guide UK – Monday Night TV