TV Guide UK Tonight: Sat 5 Sept 2026 – Casualty’s 40th Anniversary, The Box & Queen Night

Published: 2 September 2026

Saturday 5 September 2026. BBC One marks 40 years of Casualty with two consecutive episodes from 8pm, ITV1 launches Gary Lineker’s new game show The Box at 8.15pm, and BBC Two hands the whole evening over to Queen for what would have been Freddie Mercury’s 80th birthday. EastEnders doesn’t air on Saturdays.

Quick Picks: Tonight’s Best

• Casualty: 40th Anniversary BBC One, 8pm & 8.50pm. Forty years, two episodes, one very bad night in Holby.
• The Box ITV1, 8.15pm. Gary Lineker’s first job since leaving Match of the Day.
• Queen night BBC Two, from 9pm. Three programmes marking Freddie Mercury’s 80th.
• Beck BBC Four, 9pm. A new, personal case for the Swedish detective.
• EastEnders is not on tonight — it returns Monday at 7.30pm.

Early Evening

BBC Proms: The Music of Menken – BBC Two, 5.30pm

Alan Menken is one of only 28 people to hold EGOT status, alongside names like John Gielgud, Whoopi Goldberg, Elton John, Quincy Jones and Barbra Streisand, and this concert makes the case for why. Conductor Sarah Hicks leads the BBC Philharmonic and National Youth Music Theatre performers through The Little Mermaid, his 1989 Disney debut, plus Aladdin, Beauty and the Beast and Enchanted, with Nick Mohammed hosting. Recorded at the Royal Albert Hall two days earlier, it’s the kind of Proms concert that works just as well for people who’d normally give the Proms a miss. The tunes are too familiar to skip past.

The Hit List – BBC One, 5.35pm

Leicestershire colleagues Olly and Laura, who apparently run office music quizzes for fun, take on rounds including songs with cycling in the video and acts with strange Instagram handles.

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

A celebrity edition tonight, and the pairings do a lot of the work. Will Best and Fleur East go first, with Carr more interested in her Strictly partnership with Vito Coppola than the massage gun on the table. Gareth Malone and Steph McGovern draw a blank on pop star Sombr, which feels generationally inevitable, while Ellie Taylor and Jamie-Lee O’Donnell redeem the episode by nailing a Bombay Bad Boy Pot Noodle at speed. It’s a format that lives or dies on chemistry, and tonight’s line-up has enough of it.

Dick Turpin – Talking Pictures TV, 6.25pm

Richard O’Sullivan had built his name on sitcoms — Man About the House, Robin’s Nest — and here trades that for a tricorn hat as the 18th-century highwayman in this 1979 series on Talking Pictures TV. Writer Richard Carpenter had already done Catweazle and The Ghosts of Motley Hall by this point, and would go on to create Robin of Sherwood. Catch up via TPTV Encore.

Live Snooker: British Open Semi Finals – Channel 5, 6.30pm

Coverage of the last four in Cheltenham, playing best of nine for a place in Sunday’s final on Channel 5. A long evening on the baize for anyone who wants it.

Pointless Celebrities – BBC One, 7.10pm

Celebrity pairs hunt for the answers nobody else gave, in the calm before tonight’s Casualty storm.

Prime Time

The Voice UK – ITV1, 7pm

A new series, and the panel has shifted since last time: Tom Jones and will.i.am remain, Kelly Rowland’s back, and the double act of Tom Fletcher and Danny Jones takes the fourth chair. Emma Willis keeps things moving as always. Blind auditions are the format at its purest — no faces, just voices, and the awkward comedy of watching four famous people fight over someone none of them can see. It’s a formula that’s been through more tinkering than most talent shows and somehow still works when the voices are strong enough, which early episodes usually stack in its favour.

Athletics: Diamond League Brussels – BBC Two, 7pm

Day two of the season-ending Diamond League final, with overall series titles across the disciplines decided by the end of the evening. It’s the sport’s answer to a play-off final, condensed into one night rather than stretched over a season, and BBC Two carries it live before handing over to the Queen tribute at 9pm.

Casualty: 40th Anniversary – BBC One, 8pm ⭐

Forty years is a rare thing for a British drama to reach, and Casualty marks it with two consecutive episodes shot in a more cinematic style than the show usually allows itself. Flynn Byron (Olly Rix), Casualty’s clinical lead, is off duty with family plans of his own when an explosion tears through St James’s infirmary, the hospital that sits right beside Holby City ED. He drops everything and heads to the scene. At the moment it happens he’s listening to Cutting Crew’s “(I Just) Died in Your Arms,” a small detail before several hours of chaos. Holby is the only hospital in the county able to take them all. Flynn and colleague Stevie Nash (Elinor Lawless) both end up soaked and freezing after going into a flooded quarry, an accident on top of the accident, while senior consultant Dylan Keogh (William Beck), running the night shift, is dealt a personal tragedy of his own. Cam, Rida and Rash are pulled in too. Two episodes, back to back, and the show has clearly saved up for it.

The Box – ITV1, 8.15pm

This is the first thing Gary Lineker has fronted since he walked away from the BBC and Match of the Day back in May last year, and it’s been talked up for well over a year, so expectations are high. The format, adapted from Norway, is simple to describe and slightly unhinged to watch: ten celebrities, including Sara Davies, Ellie Taylor, JB Gill and John Bercow, are sealed into yellow pods and driven off to somewhere they can’t identify, where they face a mix of physical and mental tests. Every episode ends with the two weakest performers going head-to-head, and one of them leaves. Lineker’s dry, unbothered delivery suits the slightly absurd setup better than you’d expect, though whether the game itself has legs beyond a novelty first episode is the real question six weeks will answer.

Queen at the BBC – BBC Two, 9pm

The first of three programmes tonight marking what would have been Freddie Mercury’s 80th birthday, built from archive footage of Queen’s various BBC sessions and performances across the decades, including Radio Ga Ga and Bohemian Rhapsody. It’s a compilation rather than a documentary, so don’t expect narration or context, just the band, repeatedly, at their best. BBC Two clears the whole evening for it.

Beck – BBC Four, 9pm

A new case for Sweden’s longest-running detective franchise, and a grim one: a deliberate fire at a church kills the pastor of its youth congregation. Peter Haber’s Martin Beck appears only sparingly these days, with the investigation now led by Alex (Jennie Silfverhjelm), and this one hits close to home for her. She grew up attending that same church alongside one of the girls now caught up in the case, and she’s stayed close with a member of staff there ever since. First broadcast in 1997, the show has always preferred slow-burn procedure to flash, and this one is no exception. BBC Four has all episodes on iPlayer.

Lorne – Sky Documentaries, 9pm

A profile of Lorne Michaels, the man behind Saturday Night Live since he launched it back in 1975, and who, at 81, is still in the producer’s chair for it. He’s also the reason films like Three Amigos and Wayne’s World exist, and the list of careers he’s launched along the way is long. This works even if you’ve never seen a full episode of SNL, because it’s less about the sketches than how one person stayed relevant across five decades of comedy without changing much about how he does it.

Celebrity Gogglebox – E4, 9pm

Famous faces take over the sofas for an hour before the regular households return at 10pm. E4‘s reliable Saturday double bill.

Romesh Ranganathan’s Parents’ Evening – ITV1, 9.15pm

Celebrity guests are hauled in front of Romesh Ranganathan for a mock school parents’ evening, built around whatever their own children have been getting up to.

Late Night

Ghosts – BBC One, 9.40pm

A repeat outing straight after the Casualty double bill, filling the gap before the news and Match of the Day.

Queen: The Legendary 1975 Concert – BBC Two, 10pm

Queen’s Christmas Eve concert at the Hammersmith Odeon, filmed not long after A Night at the Opera came out, and it’s the sound of a band who already knew exactly how good they were. Freddie Mercury in full command of a room decades before most of tonight’s viewers were born, and it holds up. BBC Two follows it at 11.05pm with Freddie Mercury: the Final Act, and rounds the night off with In Ten Pictures at 12.35am for anyone still up.

Gogglebox – E4, 10pm

The regular households take over from the celebrity edition, picking apart the week’s TV from their own sofas.

Queen Night – Sky Arts, from 6.30pm

BBC Two isn’t the only channel marking the birthday. Sky Arts gets going three hours earlier and runs its own strand right through the evening: the 1985 Rio concert at 6.30pm, the documentary Is This the Real Life? at 7.50pm, Freddie Mercury: The Untold Story at 9pm and Days of Our Lives at 10.20pm. If you have it, the sensible move is to start here and switch over to BBC Two at nine — between the two channels there’s genuinely more Queen on television tonight than any one person needs.

Nope – Channel 4, 10.20pm

Jordan Peele’s third film, and by some distance his biggest in scale. Daniel Kaluuya and Keke Palmer play OJ and Emerald Haywood, siblings running a horse ranch in California who gradually work out that something is watching them from above, and that it isn’t a UFO in the way they first assume. Peele wrote it during the pandemic and has described it as his own attempt at the classic summer blockbuster, with Jaws, King Kong and Jurassic Park all clearly in the mix. It’s a slower build than Get Out or Us, and some of it plays better on a cinema screen than a TV one, but the sky sequences still land hard on Channel 4.

Match of the Day – BBC One, 10.30pm

Highlights of the day’s Premier League action, including Newcastle United’s home game against Bournemouth and Hull City hosting Aston Villa. BBC One also carried MOTD Live coverage of Chelsea against Aston Villa in the Women’s Super League earlier in the afternoon, from 12.25pm.

Lucy – ITV1, 10.30pm

Scarlett Johansson stars in Luc Besson’s 2014 thriller about a woman whose brain capacity gets unlocked after accidental exposure to a synthetic drug. Ninety minutes of increasingly ridiculous set pieces that mostly get away with it.

Freddie Mercury: the Final Act – BBC Two, 11.05pm

The last of tonight’s three Queen programmes, and the most sober: a documentary focused on the final years of Freddie Mercury’s life. A fitting way to close a night built around a birthday he never got the chance to see.

Sport

Newcastle United host Bournemouth at St James’ Park, kick-off 12.30pm, live on TNT Sports 1 with build-up from 11am. Hull City take on Aston Villa at 5.30pm, live on Sky Sports Main Event and Sky Sports Premier League. Day seven of the US Open at Flushing Meadows is on Sky Sports Tennis from 3.30pm and Sky Sports Main Event from 10.30pm. Football, in short, dominates the afternoon before Athletics: Diamond League Brussels takes over the terrestrial slot on BBC Two at 7pm for day two of the season-ending meet, with series titles across the disciplines decided by the close of the evening.

The Viewing Schedule

What’s On Streaming

• BBC iPlayer: Casualty: 40th Anniversary, Queen at the BBC, Queen: The Legendary 1975 Concert, Freddie Mercury: the Final Act, BBC Proms: The Music of Menken, Beck, The Hit List
• ITVX: The Box, The Voice UK, Romesh Ranganathan’s Parents’ Evening, Lucy
• Channel 4 streaming: Nope
• NOW: Lorne
• TPTV Encore: Dick Turpin

Frequently Asked Questions

Is EastEnders on tonight (Saturday 5 September 2026)?

No. EastEnders is a weekday-only soap, airing Monday to Thursday on BBC One at 7.30pm, so it simply doesn’t air at weekends — this isn’t a special absence, it never has been on a Saturday. The last episode was Thursday 3 September, and the next is Monday 7 September.

What time is Casualty’s 40th anniversary episode on tonight?

Casualty marks 40 years on BBC One with two consecutive episodes at 8pm and 8.50pm tonight, both shot in a more cinematic style than usual. Catch up via iPlayer.

What’s the best thing to watch on TV tonight (Saturday 5 September 2026)?

Casualty’s 40th-anniversary double bill on BBC One from 8pm is the one to build the evening around. If you’d rather something lighter, BBC Two’s Queen night from 9pm or ITV1’s new series The Box at 8.15pm are the other big events.

What live sport is on TV tonight: Saturday 5 September 2026?

Newcastle United host Bournemouth in the Premier League, kick-off 12.30pm on TNT Sports 1, and Hull City play Aston Villa at 5.30pm on Sky Sports Main Event. Day seven of the US Open is on Sky Sports Tennis from 3.30pm and Sky Sports Main Event from 10.30pm, and BBC Two has day two of the Diamond League athletics final from 7pm.

What’s on BBC One tonight?

BBC One’s evening runs The Hit List at 5.35pm, Alan Carr’s Celebrity Picture Slam at 6.20pm and Pointless Celebrities at 7.10pm, before Casualty’s 40th-anniversary double bill at 8pm and 8.50pm, Ghosts at 9.40pm and Match of the Day at 10.30pm.

Who are the celebrities on The Box?

The Box on ITV1 at 8.15pm has ten celebrities taking part, among them Sara Davies, Ellie Taylor, JB Gill and John Bercow. They’re sealed into yellow pods and driven to secret locations to face a mix of physical and mental tests. It’s the first programme Gary Lineker has fronted since stepping away from Match of the Day.

What time does Match of the Day start tonight?

Match of the Day is on BBC One at 10.30pm, rounding up the day’s Premier League action including Newcastle United v Bournemouth and Hull City v Aston Villa. BBC One also has MOTD Live coverage of Chelsea v Aston Villa in the Women’s Super League from 12.25pm.

What’s on BBC Two for Freddie Mercury’s 80th birthday?

BBC Two runs a night of Queen programming from 9pm: Queen at the BBC at 9pm, Queen: The Legendary 1975 Concert at 10pm, and the documentary Freddie Mercury: the Final Act at 11.05pm.

What time is Nope on Channel 4?

Nope is on Channel 4 at 10.20pm. Jordan Peele’s 2022 sci-fi stars Daniel Kaluuya and Keke Palmer as ranch-owning siblings who suspect something is watching their California property from the sky.

Is The Voice UK new tonight?

Yes. The Voice UK returns for a new series on ITV1 at 7pm, with Emma Willis hosting and coaches Tom Jones, will.i.am, Kelly Rowland, and newcomers Tom Fletcher and Danny Jones.

Final Verdict

Casualty’s 40th-anniversary double bill is the reason to be in front of BBC One at 8pm. Forty years of any drama earns the right to a bit of spectacle, and this delivers it without losing what the show does well. The Box is the more uncertain one: an interesting format with a host who suits it, but one episode isn’t enough to know if the game itself holds up over six weeks. BBC Two’s Queen night is pure comfort programming, three hours of a band who need no introduction, and Beck is a quieter alternative if the rest of the schedule feels too loud. Nope rewards patience later on. EastEnders returns on Monday at 7.30pm.

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