TV Guide UK Tonight: Wed 1 Apr 2026 – The ‘Burbs, Ambulance & A Woman of Substance

Published: 29 March 2026

Wednesday 1 April has more going on than the date might suggest. The ‘Burbs launches on Sky One at 9pm, a dark comedy starring Keke Palmer and Jack Whitehall that takes the 1989 Tom Hanks film as its starting point. Palmer makes it worth watching. Ambulance is back on BBC One at 9pm with a Yorkshire dispatch that opens with three road traffic collision calls arriving within eight minutes. Chelsea host Arsenal in the Women’s Champions League quarter-final second leg on BBC Two from 7:30pm, the Gunners sitting on a 3-1 lead. A Woman of Substance continues on Channel 4 at 9pm as war arrives in Emma Harte’s world. And Warship: Life in the Royal Navy starts a second series on Channel 5 at 8pm with Kate Humble joining HMS Iron Duke, where a routine patrol turns into something altogether more serious.

Quick Picks: Tonight’s Best

• Women’s Champions League: Chelsea v Arsenal – BBC Two, 7:30pm (ko 8pm) – Free to air, Arsenal lead 3-1 from the first leg. Chelsea need a minor miracle
• The ‘Burbs – Sky One, 9pm ⭐ – Series premiere. Keke Palmer is the clear star of this unsettling suburban comedy. Two episodes back-to-back from 9pm
• Ambulance – BBC One, 9pm – Three RTC calls in eight minutes. Yorkshire Ambulance Service at full stretch
• Chauvet: Humanity’s First Great Masterpiece – BBC Four, 9pm – Quite possibly the most beautiful documentary on tonight. 37,000-year-old cave paintings and the scientists who’ve spent careers trying to understand them
• Warship: Life in the Royal Navy – Channel 5, 8pm – Series 2 premiere. Kate Humble on HMS Iron Duke intercepting a Russian submarine in British waters

Early Evening (6:30pm – 8pm)

Great British Menu – BBC Two, 6:30pm

The Northern Ireland heat has arrived in Great British Menu 2026, and there’s a significant back story hanging over it. A chef from Northern Ireland hasn’t claimed a banquet course since Chris McClurg’s victory in 2022, and this year’s contenders are carrying that recent history into the competition. Ballymena-born Lawrence Barrow — who had to withdraw from last year’s heat for medical reasons — is back with unfinished business and a set of dishes celebrating the British film industry. He faces stiff competition from three newcomers to the show: Kristin Reagon, Callum Irwin and Marion Lancial. Expect more than one dish paying tribute to director Lisa Barros D’Sa, whose connections to Northern Ireland run deep. The heat concludes tomorrow. Catch up via BBC iPlayer.

Football: Women’s Champions League – Chelsea v Arsenal – BBC Two, 7:30pm (ko 8pm)

Arsenal go into this second leg at Stamford Bridge with a 3-1 advantage from the first leg at the Emirates, where Alessia Russo was among the scorers. For Chelsea to progress, they need to score three goals without reply — a task made considerably harder given Arsenal’s defensive organisation this season. This is, remarkably, the first time in the history of a UEFA women’s club competition that two clubs from the same city have met at this stage. The winners face either Lyon or Wolfsburg in the semi-finals. Completely free to watch live on BBC Two. If you’ve been following the women’s game at all this season, this is the fixture of the week.

The Repair Shop – BBC One, 8pm

Tonight’s episode of The Repair Shop features one of the more unusual items the show has been presented with in recent series. Jeweller Richard Talman — who has worked on countless beautiful and complex objects across a 30-year career — is handed a brooch that has been through a washing machine. Whatever the brooch looked like before the cycle, it doesn’t look like that now, and there’s a painful story behind how it came to be damaged. Talman’s task is to recover something from what’s been left.

Alongside that, there’s a decorative paper lamp that carries a very specific set of memories: it conjures both the exuberant Song dynasty-style parties of the 1980s and, more sombrely, the memory of a close friend who was directly caught up in the Aids epidemic during that same era. Also in the barn tonight are a pair of running shoes — split and scuffed, but with a documented connection to a celebrated athlete — and a reel-to-reel tape recorder that hasn’t made a sound in decades. Catch up via BBC iPlayer.

Help! I Bought It at Auction with Sarah Beeny – Channel 4, 8pm

Sarah Beeny’s property auction series continues on Channel 4. Catch up via Channel 4 streaming.

The Marlow Murder Club – US&Drama, 8pm and 9pm

The current series of The Marlow Murder Club reaches its conclusion tonight with a double bill from 8pm and 9pm. The investigation centres on the death of a celebrity chef with a reputation for making enemies — which, as murder mystery setups go, at least provides Judith, Suzie and Becks with a generous pool of suspects. Samantha Bond, Jo Martin and Cara Horgan are all back. Catch up via UKTV Play.

Warship: Life in the Royal Navy – Channel 5, 8pm (SERIES 2 PREMIERE)

The first series of Warship was better than it had any right to be, mostly because the Navy let the cameras stay on when things got interesting. Series 2 picks up where that left off. Kate Humble boards HMS Iron Duke, a Type 23 frigate on routine patrol in British coastal waters. “Routine” doesn’t last. The crew intercepts a Russian submarine in apparent difficulty inside British waters, and suddenly the episode has a shape no producer could have scripted. What do you do? It’s diplomatic, operational, and nobody’s entirely sure how dangerous. Humble doesn’t flinch. JJ Chalmers features later in the series. Catch up via 5 streaming.

Prime Time (9pm onwards)

The ‘Burbs – Sky One, 9pm and 10pm (SERIES PREMIERE) ⭐

The 1989 Tom Hanks comedy-horror was a cult item rather than a classic, so basing a TV series on it feels like either a smart creative gamble or proof that Hollywood has run out of ideas. Having watched episode one, I’m not sure it matters either way, because Keke Palmer makes the whole thing work.

Palmer plays Samira, who moves out of the city with her husband Rob (Jack Whitehall) and their new baby into what looks like a quiet, pleasant American suburb. Every house is clean and neighbourly, except for the one at the end of the road. That one is occupied by people who won’t answer the door, won’t make eye contact, and seem to be doing something behind closed curtains that nobody can quite explain. Samira, obviously, cannot leave it alone.

The opening episode gets the balance right. There is something wrong with that house, and Samira’s fixation on it doesn’t play as neurotic. The comedy and the creepiness coexist without cancelling each other out. Palmer has the comic timing and the physical instincts to hold your attention through scenes that could easily tip into silliness, and she does it without breaking a sweat. Whitehall is fine but the show knows who its lead is. Two back-to-back episodes tonight from 9pm and 10pm. Catch up via Now.

Ambulance – BBC One, 9pm

Three road traffic collision calls in eight minutes. Four ambulances, three incident commanders, two critical care paramedics, all dispatched simultaneously across Yorkshire. That’s how tonight’s Ambulance opens, and the control room sequences that follow are some of the best the show has done this series. Watching dispatchers figure out which vehicle goes where when everything is happening at once is gripping in a way that shouldn’t work on television but always does.

One of the patients trapped in a vehicle is a farmer named Dave, who looks at the wreckage of a car he’s driven for 24 years and says, with a certain resigned fondness, that he loved it. Past tense. There’s always someone in this show who makes you stop and feel something, and tonight it’s Dave. Narrated by Christopher Eccleston. Catch up via BBC iPlayer.

A Woman of Substance – Channel 4, 9pm

The First World War arrives in Barbara Taylor Bradford’s adaptation tonight, and it shifts the mood. Young Emma Harte (Jessica Reynolds) has spent the series building her world through sheer will, and now war threatens to pull apart the people around her in ways she can’t control. Emmett J. Scanlan plays Adam Fairley with exactly the right amount of entitlement as he asks Emma to talk his son out of enlisting. It’s a scene that says a lot about the class divide the show has been mapping all along.

In the 1970s timeline, older Emma (Brenda Blethyn) orders her family to gather for her birthday. If you’ve been watching, you’ll know that putting everyone who has either loved her or stabbed her in the back into one room is not going to be a cheerful afternoon. The series concludes tomorrow. Catch up via Channel 4 streaming.

The Teacher – Channel 5, 9pm

Series 3 of The Teacher — an anthology drama that reinvents itself each run with a new cast and story — continues with Victoria Hamilton’s Helen facing the fallout from a video that has now circulated through her school. The response from colleagues is worse than she’d anticipated, and the dimension she perhaps least expected: her own son, who was bullied at his previous school and finds the current situation at this one impossible to cope with. It’s a neat piece of writing that complicates Helen’s position without asking for straightforward sympathy.

Helen decides to stop playing by the rules she’s been following and fight back on terms of her own choosing. The problem is that her opponent, Cressida — played by Alice Grant — has been several steps ahead throughout, and tonight suggests she isn’t about to stop. The final episode is tomorrow. Catch up via 5 streaming.

Chauvet: Humanity’s First Great Masterpiece – BBC Four, 9pm

In December 1994, three cavers squeezed through a gap in the limestone cliffs of the Ardèche Gorge and found a series of chambers whose walls were covered in drawings. Lions, rhinos, bears, wolves, aurochs, all rendered in charcoal and red ochre with a command of form and depth that shouldn’t exist at 37,000 years old. More than a thousand images. The Chauvet cave changed what anyone thought they knew about prehistoric art.

This French documentary follows the scientists who’ve spent three decades studying the cave, which has been sealed to the public since discovery to prevent contamination. Researchers work in small teams under strict conditions, and the film matches that patience. The high-resolution footage of the art is remarkable. These aren’t rough scratches. They’re composed images that use the rock’s natural contours as part of the work. Whoever made them was good, and they knew it. Catch up via BBC iPlayer.

Hatton Garden: the Great Diamond Heist – Channel 4, 10pm

Another Hatton Garden documentary. Two films and at least four documentaries later, you’d think there was nothing left to say about a gang of pensioners drilling through a vault wall over Easter weekend 2015. But this one has something the others didn’t: one of the ringleaders on camera, actually talking.

John “Kenny” Collins sits there in a baseball cap and sunglasses, pint in hand, grumbling about how his dog got him caught. The facts of the job are well known by now — concrete wall, strong-room, maybe £14 million in gems — but the way it fell apart is where the better material sits. Collins talking through it with a mix of pride and bitterness is worth your time. Catch up via Channel 4 streaming.

Captive Audience: A Real American Horror Story – BBC Two, 11pm

The documentary series on the kidnapping of Steven Stayner and its long aftermath continues. In 1980, Steven — taken aged seven in 1972 — walked into a Californian police station with a five-year-old child he’d rescued, announcing that he too had been the victim of an abduction that lasted seven years. The media response to his return home, which involved a level of intrusion that now looks extraordinary even by the standards of that era, is examined in detail through news footage from the time. That footage — intercut with clips from the TV movie made about Steven’s story — produces an uncomfortable portrait of how a traumatic experience was processed into something more digestible, and what that processing cost the family. The full series is on BBC iPlayer.

Sport

Football: Women’s Champions League – Chelsea v Arsenal – Quarter-final second leg. Arsenal lead 3-1 from the first leg. Kick-off 8pm live on BBC Two from 7:30pm.

Cricket: IPL – Lucknow Super Giants v Delhi Capitals – Live on Sky Sports Main Event from 2:50pm.

Cricket: Women’s ODI – New Zealand v South Africa – Second of three one-day internationals from Wellington. Live on TNT Sports 2 from 6am.

Cycling: Across Flanders – Men’s and women’s one-day races from Belgium. Women’s race from 12:45pm, men’s race from 3:15pm, both on TNT Sports 1.

The Viewing Schedule

What’s On Streaming

BBC iPlayer: Ambulance (series 16), The Repair Shop, Great British Menu, Chauvet: Humanity’s First Great Masterpiece, Captive Audience: A Real American Horror Story (full series), Women’s Champions League Chelsea v Arsenal (live stream and replay)
Channel 4 streaming: A Woman of Substance (full series), Hatton Garden: the Great Diamond Heist, Help! I Bought It at Auction with Sarah Beeny
5 streaming (My5): Warship: Life in the Royal Navy (series 2), The Teacher (series 3)
Now (Sky): The ‘Burbs (requires Now Entertainment membership)
UKTV Play: The Marlow Murder Club (series 2)

Frequently Asked Questions

Is EastEnders on tonight Wednesday 1 April 2026?

EastEnders does not appear to be on BBC One tonight (Wednesday 1st April 2026). The Women’s Champions League is occupying BBC Two from 7:30pm, and BBC One’s schedule moves straight into The Repair Shop at 8pm and Ambulance at 9pm. Check BBC iPlayer for the latest available episodes.

What time is The ‘Burbs on Sky One tonight?

The ‘Burbs begins on Sky One at 9pm tonight (Wednesday 1st April 2026) — this is the UK series premiere, with a second episode following at 10pm. Keke Palmer plays Samira, a new mum who moves to the suburbs with her husband Rob (Jack Whitehall) and becomes fixated on the one unsettling house on an otherwise entirely normal street. It’s based on the 1989 Tom Hanks film of the same name. Catch up via Now.

What time is Ambulance on BBC One tonight?

Ambulance is on BBC One at 9pm tonight (Wednesday 1st April 2026). Series 16 continues with the Yorkshire Ambulance Service. Tonight opens with three road traffic collision calls arriving at the control room within eight minutes, triggering the simultaneous dispatch of four ambulances, three incident commanders and two critical care paramedics across the county. Narrated by Christopher Eccleston. Catch up via BBC iPlayer.

What time is Chelsea v Arsenal Women’s Champions League on tonight?

The Women’s Champions League quarter-final second leg between Chelsea and Arsenal is live on BBC Two from 7:30pm tonight (Wednesday 1st April 2026), with kick-off at 8pm. Arsenal won the first leg 3-1 and host Chelsea at Stamford Bridge needing to overturn that deficit. This match is completely free to watch on BBC Two and BBC iPlayer.

What time is A Woman of Substance on Channel 4 tonight?

A Woman of Substance is on Channel 4 at 9pm tonight (Wednesday 1st April 2026). Tonight’s episode brings the First World War into the story — young Emma (Jessica Reynolds) is confronted by Adam Fairley’s request that she discourage his son from enlisting. In the 1970s timeline, older Emma (Brenda Blethyn) calls her family together for what promises to be a difficult birthday occasion. The series concludes tomorrow. Catch up via Channel 4 streaming.

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

If you want live sport and it’s free, Chelsea v Arsenal in the Women’s Champions League on BBC Two from 7:30pm is the answer — Arsenal lead 3-1 and Chelsea need to mount a comeback at Stamford Bridge. For drama, The ‘Burbs on Sky One at 9pm is the most interesting new arrival — Keke Palmer is excellent in this unsettling suburban comedy series. Ambulance on BBC One at 9pm is the solid pick if you want something grounded and human.

What’s on BBC One tonight Wednesday 1 April 2026?

BBC One tonight (Wednesday 1st April 2026) has The Repair Shop at 8pm and Ambulance at 9pm. Both are available to catch up on via BBC iPlayer. EastEnders does not appear to be scheduled tonight.

What time is Warship Life in the Royal Navy on Channel 5 tonight?

Warship: Life in the Royal Navy is on Channel 5 at 8pm tonight (Wednesday 1st April 2026). This is the series 2 premiere. Kate Humble boards HMS Iron Duke, a Type 23 frigate, for a patrol mission that takes an unexpected turn when the ship intercepts a Russian submarine in British waters. JJ Chalmers also features in the series. Catch up via 5 streaming.

Final Verdict

Free-to-air pick of the night is Chelsea v Arsenal in the Women’s Champions League on BBC Two at 7:30pm. Arsenal lead 3-1 and Chelsea need three without reply. It could be a classic or it could be over by half-time.

On Sky, The ‘Burbs is the new series worth checking out. Keke Palmer carries it. Two episodes from 9pm on Sky One.

Ambulance on BBC One at 9pm is what it always is: good, reliable, occasionally devastating. Three RTCs in eight minutes tonight. And if you want something quieter, Chauvet on BBC Four at 9pm is 37,000-year-old cave paintings and the scientists who’ve spent their careers trying to understand them. It’ll stay with you longer than anything else on tonight.

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