TV Guide UK Tonight: Sat 29 Aug 2026 – Wham! 10 Days in China, The Voice UK & Paddington 2

Published: 29 August 2026

Saturday 29 August 2026. BBC Two has the film of the night with restored footage of Wham!’s trip to China, ITV1 starts a new series of The Voice UK, and BBC One runs Paddington 2 ahead of Match of the Day. BBC Four finishes Kabul with a double bill. EastEnders doesn’t air on Saturdays.

Quick Picks: Tonight’s Best

• Wham! 10 Days in China BBC Two, 9pm. Ten days in 1985, mostly unseen until now.
• Kabul BBC Four, 9pm. The last two episodes, back to back.
• 9/11: The Unseen Footage Channel 5, 9pm. Reuters material never broadcast.
• The Voice UK ITV1, 7pm. New series, same chairs.
• EastEnders is not on tonight — it returns Monday at 7.30pm.

Early Evening

The Hit List – BBC One, 5.35pm

Marvin and Rochelle Humes, three pairs of contestants and a lot of half-second intros. No gimmick, no twist round, just whether you know the song. It is the most straightforwardly enjoyable quiz on Saturday evening for exactly that reason.

Grand Designs – Channel 4, 5.30pm

Pep and Malene are putting a modern Viking hall into the Surrey Hills, and the build becomes something else entirely after Pep’s cancer diagnosis. Channel 4 at 5.30pm.

The Chase Celebrity Special – ITV1, 6pm

Jasmine Harman, Helen Lederer, Jamie Borthwick and Neil Delamere play for their charities.

Midsomer Murders – ITV3, 6.10pm

A double bill on ITV3, starting with The Village That Rose from the Dead and running straight into Crime and Punishment at 8.10pm. Vera follows at 10.10pm, which is close to four and a half hours of rural homicide in one sitting.

Alan Carr’s Celebrity Picture Slam – BBC One, 6.20pm

Six familiar faces and a £10,000 charity pot. Sue Cleaver and Charlie Brooks make an alarming team once Brooks starts channelling Janine Butcher, and Richie Anderson and Jason Mohammed have the confidence of two men who listen to a lot of radio. Lee Latchford-Evans and Kéllé Bryan complete the line-up. The format lives or dies on how quickly you can name a face, and Carr keeps it moving.

Sharpe’s Waterloo – ITV4, 6.50pm

Napoleon leaves Elba, everyone else converges on a Belgian field, and Sean Bean gets one last proper campaign. ITV4 at 6.50pm.

Sandi Toksvig’s Hidden Wonders – Channel 4, 7pm

Hadrian’s Wall, and specifically Magna Fort and Vindolanda, where things are still being pulled out of the mud at a rate that embarrasses most Roman sites in Europe. Toksvig is a good guide because she asks the questions a visitor would actually ask.

Prime Time

Wham! 10 Days in China – BBC Two, 9pm ⭐

In April 1985 Wham! played Beijing, and the whole thing was a stunt in the most literal sense: a way to break America by doing something no American band had managed. It worked, and it also opened a door nobody had expected. The best material here is not the concerts but the streets — a Peking couple taking their free cassette into an electronics shop to play it on a boombox, faces registering a colour and volume that had no local equivalent. The opening bars of Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go arriving in that setting is the moment the film is built around.

Much of the footage comes from a documentary directed by Lindsay Anderson, of all people, which was shelved and has sat unseen since. It is not a hagiography. The tension between George Michael and Andrew Ridgeley about what the trip was for runs underneath all of it, and by the end you can see the shape of the split that was coming. A repeat of Wham! at the BBC follows at 10.25pm, and BBC Two stays in 1985 with TOTP: Big Hits at 11.35pm.

Celebrating James Bond at the Proms – BBC Two, 7.30pm

Whittling six decades of Bond themes into one concert is an unwinnable job, and the programme sensibly does not try to be clever about it. Goldfinger, Nobody Does It Better and Diamonds Are Forever were never in doubt. Daniel Bartholomew-Poyser conducts the BBC Concert Orchestra with an energy borrowed from his recent disco and soul Proms, which suits this material more than you would guess. Nick Mohammed hosts from a box above the Royal Albert Hall, doing a bit as the man in the earpiece.

The Voice UK – ITV1, 7pm

A new run, and the chairs are unchanged: will.i.am and Sir Tom Jones, who between them have now heard more first auditions than anyone alive, plus Kelly Rowland and the McFly pair of Tom Fletcher and Danny Jones. Emma Willis holds it together. The blind audition remains a genuinely good piece of television engineering — a format where the judges are the ones under pressure.

Paddington 2 – BBC One, 7.10pm

The bear buys a pop-up book for Aunt Lucy, the book is stolen, and Paddington goes to prison for it, where he substantially improves the food. Hugh Grant is the vain, washed-up actor responsible, and he is having the time of his life; Brendan Gleeson’s Knuckles McGinty softens at roughly the rate you would want. Joanna Lumley, Richard Ayoade and Tom Conti fill out the supporting bench. If you have somehow avoided it, tonight is the night.

Black Panther – Channel 4, 8pm

Chadwick Boseman’s T’Challa takes the throne of Wakanda and immediately has to defend it from a cousin with a legitimate grievance. What holds up eight years on is Michael B Jordan’s Killmonger, who is right about almost everything and wrong about what to do with it, and the fact that Ryan Coogler built a superhero film around a political argument rather than a threat to a city. Boseman had been circling the role for years before Marvel cast him — a copy of the comic turned up in his trailer on another shoot with a note attached. Terminator: Dark Fate follows at 10.45pm.

9/11: The Unseen Footage – Channel 5, 9pm

Reuters kept a great deal of what its crews shot that morning, and this film uses it. It is not a geopolitical documentary and does not attempt to be one; the frame is the day itself and the 48 hours after. The interviews that land hardest are with the people who worked the rubble — not the noise or the chaos, but the silence, and the point at which everyone stopped expecting to find anyone. Hard to watch, and worth it.

Kabul – BBC Four, 9pm

Two episodes to finish, at 9pm and 9.55pm. Crowds press at the airport gates, arguments break out between the soldiers and diplomats supposed to be helping, and families are separated and occasionally put back together. Nothing moves forward. In the final episode the Americans will not let anyone else through the gates, so a crowd builds outside them, and the explosion arrives at Abbey Gate. Bleak, precise and occasionally, in small doses, humane. BBC Four has the full series on iPlayer.

The Weakest Link – BBC One, 8.50pm

Donna Preston, Nikita Kuzmin, Jon Culshaw and Jamelia among those trying to work out whether to vote off the useful player or the annoying one.

Wallander – Drama, 9pm

Faceless Killers, the first of the Branagh films, in which an elderly couple are killed at an isolated farmhouse and the investigation curdles into something about the country rather than the crime. Two hours on Drama.

Chaplin – Sky Arts, 9pm

Robert Downey Jr’s performance is still the reason to watch Attenborough’s biopic, and it is astonishing how little of it has dated. Sky Arts at 9pm. Earlier in the day the channel repeats Portrait Artist of the Decade at 3pm, in which past winners compete to paint Dame Judi Dench.

Ghosts – BBC One, 9.35pm

Mary finally explains how she found her voice, and Thomas decides to give up on Alison, which lasts about as long as you would expect.

Quatermass 2 – Talking Pictures TV, 9.05pm

Brian Donlevy’s professor goes looking for the source of a strange meteor shower and finds a government facility that nobody will explain. Val Guest directs, Sidney James turns up, and the whole thing is far nastier than 1957 usually allowed. Talking Pictures TV follows it with Night of the Living Dead at 11.25pm.

Elsewhere at 9pm, Film4 has Murder on the Orient Express from 8pm, ITV2 shows The Dark Knight, GREAT! Action has Hercules, and Quest runs a Repair Shop double.

Late Night

Match of the Day – BBC One, 10.25pm

Five games, including Liverpool’s first home fixture of the season against Nottingham Forest and a meeting of two promoted sides as Coventry host Hull.

Kinky Boots – Channel 5, 10.30pm

A Northampton shoe factory, an inherited business with no future and a drag performer who points out that there is a whole market nobody is measuring for. It is based on a real Northampton firm, Steve Pateman’s, whose story was told in a 1999 BBC documentary — the factory closed a few years after the film, but the musical it produced has outlived everything. Joel Edgerton and Chiwetel Ejiofor make the partnership work. Channel 5 at 10.30pm.

AEW: Double or Nothing 2026 – ITV4, 10.30pm

From the Louis Armstrong Stadium in Queens, with Jon Moxley against Kyle O’Reilly, Will Ospreay against Samoa Joe and MJF against Darby Allin.

RAYE @ Reading Festival 2026 – BBC One, 11.35pm

She took the penultimate top billing on the main stage, and this remains the best-argued case anywhere for putting a full band behind a pop singer.

Terminator: Dark Fate – Channel 4, 10.45pm

Linda Hamilton back as Sarah Connor, which is most of what it has going for it, and Arnold Schwarzenegger in a role the film builds a surprisingly good joke around.

Sport

Day three of the second Test between England and Pakistan at Lord’s starts at 11am on Sky Sports Main Event and Sky Sports Cricket, with highlights on BBC Four at 7pm — though a Test that has moved quickly can finish inside three days, so check before you settle in. In the Premier League, Liverpool host Nottingham Forest at 12.30pm on TNT Sports 1 and Tottenham take on Newcastle at 5.30pm on Sky Sports Main Event and Sky Sports Premier League. Middlesbrough v West Brom in the Championship kicks off at 12.30pm on ITV1 and Sky Sports. Match of the Day is at 10.25pm, EFL highlights are on ITV4 at 9pm, and Channel 5 has stage eight of La Vuelta at 7pm.

The Viewing Schedule

What’s On Streaming

• BBC iPlayer: Wham! 10 Days in China, Celebrating James Bond at the Proms, Paddington 2, Ghosts, Kabul (full series), Match of the Day, RAYE @ Reading Festival 2026
• ITVX: The Voice UK, The Chase Celebrity Special, The 1% Club
• Channel 4 streaming: Black Panther, Terminator: Dark Fate, Sandi Toksvig’s Hidden Wonders, Celebrity Gogglebox
• 5: 9/11: The Unseen Footage, Kinky Boots, Andrew, Fergie & the Scandal of SouthYork
• NOW: Chaplin, Portrait Artist of the Decade
• U: The Brokenwood Mysteries, Gavin and Stacey, I’m Alan Partridge

Frequently Asked Questions

Is EastEnders on tonight (Saturday 29 August 2026)?

No. EastEnders does not air on Saturdays. It runs Monday to Thursday on BBC One, so the next episode is Monday 31 August at 7.30pm, when the Hawkins family arrive in Walford and wedding fever takes hold ahead of Cindy and Kim’s big days. All four of the week’s episodes land on iPlayer as a boxset each Monday morning.

What is Wham! 10 Days in China about?

It’s on BBC Two at 9pm. In 1985 Wham! became the first western pop act allowed to play Communist China, and most of what was filmed there has never been shown — a documentary shot by Lindsay Anderson was shelved. This film draws on that restored footage. Wham! at the BBC follows at 10.25pm.

What time is The Voice UK on tonight?

The Voice UK opens a new series on ITV1 at 7pm and runs to 8.15pm. Emma Willis hosts, with will.i.am, Sir Tom Jones, Kelly Rowland and McFly’s Tom Fletcher and Danny Jones coaching. The 1% Club follows at 8.15pm.

What live sport is on TV tonight: Saturday 29 August 2026?

Day three of the second Test between England and Pakistan at Lord’s is on Sky Sports Main Event and Sky Sports Cricket from 11am, with highlights on BBC Four at 7pm. Liverpool v Nottingham Forest kicks off at 12.30pm on TNT Sports 1, Tottenham v Newcastle at 5.30pm on Sky Sports Main Event and Sky Sports Premier League, and Middlesbrough v West Brom at 12.30pm on ITV1 and Sky Sports. Match of the Day is on BBC One at 10.25pm.

What’s the best thing to watch on TV tonight (Saturday 29 August 2026)?

Wham! 10 Days in China on BBC Two at 9pm. BBC Four’s Kabul double bill from 9pm and Channel 5’s 9/11: The Unseen Footage are the alternatives, and both are worth recording if you’re watching the Wham! film live.

What film is on Channel 4 tonight?

Black Panther is on Channel 4 at 8pm until 10.45pm, with Terminator: Dark Fate straight afterwards. Both are free on Channel 4 streaming.

What time is Paddington 2 on BBC One?

Paddington 2 is on BBC One at 7.10pm, after Alan Carr’s Celebrity Picture Slam at 6.20pm and before The Weakest Link at 8.50pm. It’s also on iPlayer.

What happens in the last episode of Kabul?

BBC Four shows the final two episodes at 9pm and 9.55pm. An Isis emir is captured and a plot to bomb the airport comes to light; in the closing episode the blast hits Abbey Gate with most of the characters gathered there. The full series is on iPlayer.

Is there any Midsomer Murders on tonight?

Yes. ITV3 runs two episodes, at 6.10pm and 8.10pm, with Vera following at 10.10pm.

Final Verdict

Saturday belongs to Wham! 10 Days in China on BBC Two — a shelved film finally getting its outing, and much odder and better than a nostalgia clip show. Kabul finishes strongly on BBC Four and 9/11: The Unseen Footage on Channel 5 is the pick if you want documentary rather than music. For the family sofa, Paddington 2 on BBC One at 7.10pm remains unbeatable. EastEnders is back on Monday at 7.30pm.

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