TV Guide UK Tonight: Mon 30 Mar 2026 – Babies, Hunting the Silver Killer & The Teacher

Published: 26 March 2026

Easter Monday, and the bank holiday schedule is doing something a bit more interesting than you might expect. Babies arrives on BBC One at 9pm — a new drama from Stefan Golaszewski, the writer behind Mum and Him & Her, and it is immediately one of the most emotionally honest pieces of television this year. Over on ITV1 at 9pm, a disturbing true-crime documentary about suspicious deaths in a quiet Cheshire town asks whether a serial killer was hiding in plain sight for three decades. And Channel 5 opens a new series of The Teacher with Victoria Hamilton taking over from Sheridan Smith and Kara Tointon — not an easy act to follow, but she pulls it off. EastEnders is on BBC One at 7:30pm for your regular Albert Square update.

Quick Picks: Tonight’s Best

• Babies ⭐ — BBC One, 9pm — Stefan Golaszewski’s new drama; Paapa Essiedu and Siobhán Cullen are extraordinary
• Hunting the Silver Killer — ITV1, 9pm — Thirty-year-old Cheshire cold cases that refuse to add up
• The Teacher — Channel 5, 9pm — Series 3 opens strongly with Victoria Hamilton in fine form
• Clash of the Superpowers: America vs China — BBC Two, 9pm — Both episodes; the Boris Johnson Red Arrows anecdote alone is worth it
• Mastermind / University Challenge — BBC Two, 8pm and 8:30pm — Clive Myrie, Christopher Nolan, and the last quarter-final
• Rooster — Sky One, 10pm — Steve Carell’s comedy is better than its premise suggests

Early Evening

Farm 999 – BBC One, 10:15am

A new daytime series that combines Steph McGovern with three very different British institutions: farming, crime and emergency services. Tonight’s opening episode takes in fly-tipping operations run by organised crime gangs targeting rural land, the possibility of the white-tailed eagle being reintroduced to certain parts of England, and a freak accident that connects to Michael Buerk’s long-running 999 franchise. If you’re off work for Easter Monday and looking for something undemanding, it’s on iPlayer.

EastEnders – BBC One, 7:30pm

Penny and Vinny are heading for their first baby scan together — an anxious milestone under any circumstances, and the show handles the weight of that anxiety well. Elsewhere, Zoe is attempting to rebuild a relationship she has damaged, while Zack finds himself in a tight spot financially with no obvious way out. Catch up via BBC iPlayer.

Dangerous Dogs: Is the Ban Working? Panorama – BBC One, 8pm

Sam Poling investigates the government’s ban on XL bully dogs, which came into force in February 2024. The question this documentary is asking — whether the ban has actually delivered the reduction in serious attacks it was brought in to achieve — is a legitimate one, and the programme goes about answering it methodically rather than reaching for easy outrage. Worth watching if you’ve followed the debate, or if you’re just curious what happened to all those dogs. Catch up via BBC iPlayer. (Note: 8:30pm in Wales, 10:40pm in Northern Ireland.)

Emmerdale – ITV1, 8pm

The village is in a state of controlled panic after Lisa is rushed to hospital. Jacob has put two and two together and the number he’s come up with is poisoning — and the more people look at the timeline, the harder it is to dismiss. Cain and Liam carry Lisa to the ambulance in tense circumstances while suspicion begins settling, uncomfortably, on several people at once. The echoes of a real-life Australian poisoning case from 2023 are hard to ignore. Catch up via ITVX.

Mastermind – BBC Two, 8pm

Clive Myrie takes his seat and prepares to ask probing questions on specialist subjects including the films of Christopher Nolan. Whether you’re a Nolan devotee who’s memorised every runtime and plot mechanism or someone who watched Oppenheimer and then pretended to have seen all the others, this one’s worth a go. Catch up via BBC iPlayer.

University Challenge – BBC Two, 8:30pm

The last quarter-final of the series, with Clive Myrie again in the chair. By this stage in the competition the questions are noticeably harder and the teams noticeably more confident — which makes for better television than the early rounds, where someone buzzes in on a history question and then visibly panics. Catch up via BBC iPlayer.

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

Joe Swash and Suzanne Mulholland pay a visit to a household where convenience food has quietly taken over the weekly shop. The snack drawer alone — apparently something between a crime scene and a corner shop — tells a story about how habits creep up on families without anyone quite noticing. The show does what it does well: identifying the financial and health costs without making the family feel awful about themselves. Catch up via Channel 4 streaming.

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

Dom Chinea’s to-do list continues to defeat him. Tonight he’s taking on two jobs that have been sitting on the list long enough to become embarrassing: replacing the sloping concrete floor in his converted cow shed (a problem that has apparently been annoying him for years) and finally making his vintage Triumph motorbike rideable. His mate Sam Lovegrove delivers the most accurate summary of the motorbike situation: “You bought a lemon.” Catch up via U.

Prime Time

Babies ⭐ – BBC One, 9pm

This is the one to watch tonight. Stefan Golaszewski — whose previous work includes the quietly devastating Mum and the warmly observational Him & Her — has written a drama about the experience of trying to start a family, and he’s treated the subject with the same precision and care he brings to everything else.

Stephen (Paapa Essiedu) and Lisa (Siobhán Cullen) are a happy couple who want a baby. Stephen’s friend Dave (Jack Bannon) has a child from a previous relationship and has recently got together with Amanda (Charlotte Riley), who is composed, self-contained and not especially warm. These two relationships run alongside each other, and the contrast is doing a lot of careful thematic work.

The series doesn’t shy away from the statistics — one in eight pregnancies ends in miscarriage — and it doesn’t romanticise what that means for the people living through it. There’s a line in tonight’s episode, delivered quietly, that lands like a punch: “I can’t find a heartbeat.” It’s the kind of writing that earns that moment rather than reaching for it.

Essiedu and Cullen are exceptional. Both are capable of conveying the kind of happiness that’s quietly bracing itself for something to go wrong, and the writing gives them room to do that without spelling it out. The series continues tomorrow at 9pm on BBC One, with the full run on iPlayer.

Clash of the Superpowers: America vs China – BBC Two, 9pm

Both episodes of the final instalment tonight on BBC Two. The series has traced the arc of US-China relations from Nixon’s visit through to the present day, and the final episode examines the Trump and Biden approaches — both of which, it turns out, involved more arm-wrestling than grandmaster strategy. China kept winning the arm-wrestling.

The standout anecdote involves the G7 summit where Boris Johnson — apparently convinced that deploying the Red Arrows would generate useful diplomatic noise — did so at a moment that successfully prevented Emmanuel Macron from joining a side meeting. Whether that was the intended outcome remains diplomatically unclear. Both episodes on iPlayer.

Hunting the Silver Killer – ITV1, 9pm

Two elderly couples found dead in their beds in Wilmslow, Cheshire — three years apart, in what appeared to be near-identical circumstances. In each case, the official verdict was that the husband had killed his wife before taking his own life. Journalist David Collins, who broke the original story, was not convinced then and is not convinced now. Neither are two former senior coroner’s officers who worked the cases.

The documentary doesn’t rush to a conclusion, which is the right instinct. The evidence it presents — the forensic details, the timelines, the patterns — is hard to dismiss. Whether a single killer was preying on vulnerable elderly people in the same affluent Cheshire town, or whether both tragedies were exactly what they appeared to be, is a question the programme takes seriously rather than sensationalising. Catch up via ITVX.

The Teacher – Channel 5, 9pm

Series three of this drama opens with Victoria Hamilton stepping into the role of Helen Simpson, an elite boarding school teacher who has strong opinions about education and a corresponding inability to keep them to herself. She’s been here before — Sheridan Smith and Kara Tointon both played teachers who got themselves into serious trouble — but Hamilton brings something slightly different to the part: a sense of genuine conviction rather than simple recklessness.

The source of tension this time is Cressida (Alice Grant), a student who challenges everything: gender identity, safe spaces, the appropriateness of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream in a modern classroom. Helen’s responses are — how to put this charitably — not always well-judged. “I’m the teacher. I’m trying to educate you, for f***k’s sake!” she shrieks at one point, which is not in any staff handbook. A four-parter, continuing nightly until Thursday. Full series on 5 streaming.

The Last Hunt for Nazi Gold – Sky History, 9pm

Historian Guy Walters follows the well-documented legends of Nazi gold out of the realm of conspiracy theory and into the archive. The legends have roots in real history — and Walters visits a vast German salt mine where American soldiers unearthed a significant cache at the end of the war, before heading to Bavaria to search the hillsides around an Alpine lake where further treasure is rumoured to be buried. He goes, he notes, more in hope than expectation. Catch up via Now.

Late Night

Rooster – Sky One, 10pm

Bill Lawrence — who co-created Ted Lasso over at Apple TV — is back with a comedy about Greg (Steve Carell), a man finally experiencing college life having missed out the first time around. The show’s best decision is casting Phil Dunster as Archie, Greg’s son-in-law turned nemesis. Dunster played Jamie Tartt in Ted Lasso — a role that turned a shallow, preening footballer into someone surprisingly sympathetic — and he’s doing something similar here, finding the human scale inside a character who is essentially a comic obstacle. He’s very funny. Catch up via Now.

Sport

Cricket: IPL — Rajasthan Royals v Chennai Super Kings — Live on Sky Sports Cricket from 2:50pm, Sky Sports Main Event from 3pm. T20 action from Guwahati.

Tennis: Bucharest Open — Day one of the ATP clay-court tournament in Romania. Live on Sky Sports Tennis from 10:30am.

Baseball: Kansas City Royals v Minnesota Twins — TNT Sports 1 from 9pm, first pitch 9:30pm. Major League Baseball from Kauffman Stadium.

The Viewing Schedule

What’s On Streaming

BBC iPlayer: Babies (full series), EastEnders, Panorama: Dangerous Dogs, Mastermind, University Challenge, Clash of the Superpowers: America vs China, Farm 999
ITVX: Hunting the Silver Killer, Emmerdale
5 streaming: The Teacher (full series 3 from tonight)
Channel 4 streaming: Batch from Scratch: Cooking for Less
Now: Rooster, The Last Hunt for Nazi Gold
Sky Sports: IPL cricket, Bucharest Open tennis

Frequently Asked Questions

What time is EastEnders on tonight Monday 30 March 2026?

EastEnders is on BBC One at 7:30pm tonight (Monday 30th March 2026). Penny and Vinny are going for their first baby scan, Zoe is attempting to rebuild a relationship, and Zack is struggling with money problems. Catch up via BBC iPlayer.

What time is Babies on BBC One tonight?

Babies starts at 9pm on BBC One tonight (Monday 30th March 2026). Written by Stefan Golaszewski, it stars Paapa Essiedu and Siobhán Cullen as Stephen and Lisa — a couple navigating the emotional difficulties of trying to start a family. The full series is on BBC iPlayer. It continues tomorrow night at 9pm.

What time is The Teacher on Channel 5 tonight?

The Teacher series 3 begins at 9pm on Channel 5 tonight (Monday 30th March 2026). Victoria Hamilton plays boarding school teacher Helen Simpson, whose classroom confrontations with provocative student Cressida escalate rapidly. All four episodes of the series are available now on 5 streaming.

What time is Hunting the Silver Killer on ITV1?

Hunting the Silver Killer is on ITV1 at 9pm tonight (Monday 30th March 2026). The documentary revisits two almost identical murder-suicides 30 years apart in Wilmslow, Cheshire — journalist David Collins and two former coroner’s officers are not satisfied the official verdicts told the whole story. Catch up via ITVX.

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

Our top pick for Easter Monday 30th March 2026 is Babies on BBC One at 9pm. Stefan Golaszewski’s new drama is quietly devastating and brilliantly performed — Paapa Essiedu and Siobhán Cullen are among the best on British TV right now, and the writing treats a difficult subject with real honesty. If true crime is more appealing, Hunting the Silver Killer on ITV1 at 9pm is a compelling and unsettling documentary. The Teacher on Channel 5 at 9pm is a strong series opener with Victoria Hamilton on excellent form.

What’s on BBC Two tonight?

BBC Two tonight (Monday 30th March 2026) has Mastermind at 8pm, University Challenge at 8:30pm, and then both episodes of Clash of the Superpowers: America vs China from 9pm. All available via BBC iPlayer.

Final Verdict

Babies at 9pm on BBC One is the clear choice tonight. Stefan Golaszewski writes about ordinary domestic life with a precision that consistently wrong-foots you — you think you’re watching something gentle and then a quiet line lands with disproportionate force. Paapa Essiedu and Siobhán Cullen are both at their very best here. Don’t miss it.

Hunting the Silver Killer on ITV1 at 9pm is the strongest true-crime offering in a while — a case that genuinely rewards closer attention, presented without the hysteria that often accompanies this kind of documentary.

The Teacher on Channel 5 at 9pm opens series three confidently with Victoria Hamilton bringing a different energy to the role than her predecessors. The classroom confrontations are sharp and the subject matter is live enough to provoke a reaction.

Mastermind and University Challenge on BBC Two at 8pm and 8:30pm remain the most reliably satisfying way to spend a weeknight evening without committing to anything complicated.

Related: What’s On TV Tonight Monday | What’s On TV Tonight Sun 29 Mar 2026 | What’s On TV Tonight Tues 31 Mar 2026