The Fourth of July casts a long, confident shadow across this week’s viewing, and broadcasters have embraced the 250th anniversary of America’s Declaration of Independence with gusto. History, music, politics, travel, and a run of films that remind you just how deeply American storytelling has seeped into the cultural bloodstream. It’s a week where Neil Armstrong rubs shoulders with Ravi Shankar, where The Specials share the stage with Blondie, and where Ridley Scott’s neon‑soaked Los Angeles still feels like the future.

There’s celebration, certainly, but also reflection. The concluding chapter of The American Revolution lands with real weight, while Armstrong offers a quieter portrait of a man who changed the world simply by stepping onto another. And if you’d rather mark the week with music, Sky Arts and the BBC have you covered with 2 Tone, Blondie, and a generous helping of American icons.

Film lovers are spoiled: Blade Runner, The Lady Eve, Leave Her to Heaven, Atonement, BlackBerry, Official Secrets, Red Rooms — a line‑up that swings from Technicolor noir to modern paranoia without missing a beat. It’s a rich, varied week, and one that rewards dipping in and out rather than trying to consume everything at once.

Saturday 4 July

8.00pm – Alexander Armstrong Across America (Channel 5)

Armstrong’s cross‑country wander continues, this time through West Virginia. He’s a genial guide — curious without being intrusive, amused without being arch — and the series has settled into a relaxed, intelligent rhythm. Ideal early‑evening viewing.

9.00pm – 50 American Music Icons at the BBC (BBC Two)

A generous sweep through the artists who shaped modern music. Expect the usual BBC archive magic: grainy footage, unexpected pairings, and performances that still crackle decades later.

9.00pm – Starter for 10 (BBC Four, 2006)

Starter for 10 begins as a gentle comedy about a working‑class lad arriving at Bristol University in the mid‑1980s, but quickly becomes something more textured: a story about belonging, aspiration, and the awkwardness of trying to reinvent yourself. James McAvoy plays Brian with a mix of earnestness and self‑inflicted calamity, the kind of young man who wants desperately to be clever but hasn’t yet learned how to be comfortable.

The University Challenge sequences are great fun — brisk, competitive, and full of the kind of trivia that once felt like the height of sophistication. But the film’s real strength lies in its emotional honesty. Brian’s romantic missteps, his friendships, and his attempts to reconcile his new life with the one he left behind are handled with a light touch that never slips into sentimentality.

The supporting cast is uniformly excellent, especially Rebecca Hall and Dominic Cooper, who bring nuance to roles that could easily have been caricatures. And the soundtrack — all jangly guitars and wistful nostalgia — gives the film a warm, lived‑in feel. A small story told with generosity.

9.00pm – The Specials Live from Coventry Cathedral (Sky Arts)

This 2019 concert captures The Specials at a moment when their music felt newly urgent. Performing inside Coventry Cathedral — a space steeped in history and resilience — the band channels decades of political frustration into something electrifying. There’s no sense of nostalgia or polite revivalism; the performance is sharp, committed, and defiantly present.

Tracks like “Ghost Town” and “A Message to You, Rudy” land with renewed force, their themes of inequality and social tension sounding depressingly familiar in 2026. It’s a reminder that 2 Tone wasn’t just a musical movement; it was a cultural reckoning.

10.15pm – The Creator (Channel 4, 2023)

The Creator wears its ambition openly. Gareth Edwards builds a future where artificial intelligence has evolved into something indistinguishable from humanity, and the film explores the uneasy boundary between creation and control. John David Washington anchors the story with a performance full of conflicted empathy, and the relationship between his character and the AI child gives the film its emotional spine.

Visually stunning, thematically bold, occasionally uneven — but always sincere.

10.20pm – Anyone But You (BBC One, 2023)

A sun‑drenched rom‑com that leans unapologetically into screwball tradition. Sydney Sweeney and Glen Powell spark off each other with the kind of chemistry that can’t be faked, turning bickering into foreplay and mishaps into momentum. Breezy, confident, and exactly what it sets out to be.

10.35pm – Record On: The Specials – A Message to You (Sky Arts)

A compact, lively documentary exploring one of the defining tracks of the 2 Tone era. It’s a reminder that some songs become landmarks not because they’re catchy, but because they capture a moment with uncanny precision.

12.10am – White Riot (Sky Arts)

White Riot remains one of the most vital music‑politics documentaries of recent years — urgent, angry, and absolutely crackling with purpose. It charts the rise of Rock Against Racism, that scrappy, DIY coalition of musicians, activists and ordinary kids who refused to let the far right colonise Britain’s youth culture in the 1970s. What makes the film sing is its blend of raw archival footage and present‑day testimony: it feels historical and contemporary at the same time, a reminder that the battles fought then still echo now.

The documentary captures the electricity of those early RAR gigs — the sense of possibility, the belief that culture could be a weapon rather than a mirror. Punk, reggae, ska: all thrown together in a glorious, defiant mess that said more about Britain than any politician ever could. It’s a portrait of people who didn’t wait for permission to resist; they just built a movement out of flyers, fanzines, borrowed amps and sheer bloody-minded conviction.

And of course, the far right noticed. The National Front, rattled by RAR’s momentum and terrified of losing cultural ground, responded by creating Rock Against Communism — a clumsy attempt at a counter‑movement that eventually morphed into White Noise, a more organised and effective effort to push racist music into youth subcultures. It was the mirror image of RAR: where one side preached solidarity, the other peddled division; where one fused genres, the other narrowed them into a clenched fist. The fact that White Noise gained traction is a reminder that culture wars aren’t new — and they’re never fought on just one front.

White Riot doesn’t shy away from any of this. It’s a call to remember that culture can be a force for change, but also that it’s always contested. RAR won hearts, minds and dancefloors — but the NF kept trying to exert influence. The film ends with a sense of unfinished business, and rightly so. We’re still waiting on the documentary that tackles Rock Against Communism and White Noise head‑on, tracing how the far right tried to reshape youth culture in the opposite direction. It’s a story that deserves the same forensic, fiery treatment.

Until then, White Riot stands as a testament to what happens when ordinary people decide they’ve had enough — and pick up guitars instead of giving up.

1.30am – Godland (BBC Two, 2022)

A stark Icelandic drama of faith, colonialism and endurance. Slow, severe and visually extraordinary — a film that demands patience and rewards it with depth.

1.55am – Ian Dury and the Blockheads: Hold On to Your Structure (Sky Arts)

A late‑night jolt of energy, attitude and sheer artistic stubbornness. This documentary doesn’t just sketch Ian Dury; it inhabits him — the charisma, the bite, the wit, the refusal to be anything other than gloriously, awkwardly himself. Dury wasn’t built for tidy narratives or polite applause, and the programme wisely leans into that. It shows a performer who treated the stage like a battleground and a playground at the same time, swaggering through songs that sounded like they’d been chiselled out of everyday life and then electrified.

What emerges is a portrait of a man who understood rhythm as instinct, language as weaponry, and performance as a kind of joyful confrontation. The Blockheads, tight as a drumskin and twice as sharp, weren’t just a backing band — they were co‑conspirators. You see how their precision allowed Dury’s lyrical mischief to land with maximum impact. The documentary captures that chemistry beautifully: the way a sly grin from Dury could send the whole ensemble pivoting into something loose, funky and unmistakably theirs.

There’s also a strong sense of context — Britain in the late 70s, restless, loud, and culturally up for grabs. Dury wasn’t punk, but he wasn’t not punk either. He occupied that strange, thrilling space where pub rock, art‑school eccentricity and working‑class grit collided. The film shows how he channelled all of it: disability, class, frustration, humour, defiance. He turned the messiness of life into songs that felt like they were speaking directly to you, even when they were taking the mick.

What the programme gets right is the emotional truth beneath the bravado. Dury’s uncompromising nature wasn’t just attitude — it was survival. He built a structure for himself out of words, rhythm and sheer bloody-mindedness, and then held onto it with both hands. The documentary honours that without smoothing the edges or romanticising the chaos.

It’s a lively, affectionate, slightly rowdy tribute to a performer who never fitted neatly into any category and never wanted to. Charismatic, uncompromising, utterly original — the film reminds you that Ian Dury didn’t just make music. He made a world, and invited you in if you were brave enough to keep up.

Sunday 5 July

9.25am – Jane Eyre (BBC Two, 1943)

What makes this version endure isn’t just its fidelity to Charlotte Brontë’s story, but the way it captures the novel’s emotional weather. There’s a dampness to the air, a sense of wind pressing against old stone, that gives the whole film a haunted, half‑lit quality. Joan Fontaine plays Jane with that soft‑spoken resolve she was so good at: a woman who has learned to survive by shrinking herself, yet whose inner life is fierce, alert, and quietly defiant. You see it in the way she holds her posture, in the small hesitations before she speaks, as though weighing the cost of honesty.

Orson Welles, meanwhile, storms through Thornfield like a man wrestling with his own legend. His Rochester is theatrical, yes, but that’s part of the pleasure — he brings a bruised grandeur to the role, a sense of someone who has lived too intensely and now hides in the shadows of his own house. When he and Fontaine share the frame, the contrast is electric: her stillness against his volatility, her moral clarity against his romantic turbulence.

The Gothic atmosphere isn’t decoration; it’s the film’s emotional architecture. The fog, the candlelit corridors, the sudden bursts of sound — all of it mirrors Jane’s journey from repression to self‑possession. Even after eighty years, the film feels startlingly alive, a reminder of how potent Brontë’s story becomes when treated not as a costume drama but as a tale of yearning, loneliness, and the stubborn hope of finding a place where one’s heart is finally recognised.

8.00pm – Inside Classical: The Rite of Spring (BBC Four)

A clear, engaging introduction to Stravinsky’s revolutionary masterpiece. Accessible without oversimplifying — ideal for curious newcomers.

8.45pm – BBC Proms 2017: Passages (BBC Four)

Ravi Shankar and Philip Glass’s collaboration is performed in full. Hypnotic, intricate, and quietly transcendent.

9.15pm – Armstrong (PBS America)

A thoughtful portrait of Neil Armstrong that avoids hero worship. Disciplined, private, and quietly determined — a man defined not by fame but by precision.

10.00pm – Ravi Shankar in Concert (BBC Four)

Watching Shankar perform is witnessing music as conversation. Fluid, expressive, and masterful.

10.00pm – Blade Runner (BBC Two, 1982)

There are films that age, films that date, and films that simply continue — Blade Runner belongs to the last category. Every return to Ridley Scott’s neon‑drenched Los Angeles feels like stepping back into a dream you half‑remember. The city is vast, exhausted, and strangely beautiful, as if decay itself has become a kind of art form.

What keeps the film alive isn’t just the production design; it’s the moral unease that runs through every frame. Rutger Hauer’s Roy Batty remains one of cinema’s great tragic figures — a creature fighting for dignity in a world that denies him even the right to exist.

Vangelis’s score wraps the film in drifting melancholy. Blade Runner hasn’t been overtaken by the future because it already occupies it.

1.20am – Glory (Channel 4, 1989)

What strikes you, watching Glory again, is how completely it refuses to soften the brutality of the American Civil War. Edward Zwick frames the story of the 54th Massachusetts — the first all‑Black regiment in the Union Army — with a kind of sombre grandeur, letting the mud, smoke and chaos speak for themselves. It’s a film about courage, yes, but also about the grinding cost of being asked to prove your worth in a world determined to doubt it.

Denzel Washington’s performance remains the film’s emotional centre of gravity. He plays Private Trip with a rawness that never tips into sentimentality: a man hardened by injustice, suspicious of authority, and yet capable of moments of piercing vulnerability. The famous flogging scene still lands like a punch — Washington’s silent tears aren’t a plea for sympathy but a statement of defiance, a refusal to be broken again. It’s one of those rare moments in cinema where an actor seems to compress an entire history into a single expression.

Around him, Morgan Freeman brings quiet moral authority, and Matthew Broderick — often underestimated — gives Colonel Shaw a thoughtful, conflicted presence, a young officer learning the difference between command and leadership. The film’s final act, the assault on Fort Wagner, is staged with operatic intensity: not triumphant, but tragic, a recognition that heroism often comes without reward.

Glory endures because it treats its subject with seriousness and respect. It’s earnest, moving, and essential — a reminder of the sacrifices made by men who fought not just for a country, but for the right to be seen as part of it.

Monday 6 July

2.45pm – The Lady Eve (Film4, 1941)

Preston Sturges’ sparkling comedy remains a masterclass in elegance and timing. Barbara Stanwyck is sensational — sly, seductive and effortlessly in control — while Henry Fonda’s earnest innocence gives the film its comic heartbeat.

Sturges’ dialogue still crackles, full of sly jokes and perfectly timed reversals. Romance, deception and champagne-light wit combine into something timeless.

10.40pm – I Am Legend (BBC One, 2007)

Will Smith carries this post‑apocalyptic thriller with surprising emotional heft. Atmospheric and quietly affecting.

11.40pm – BlackBerry (Film4, 2023)

12.05am – Official Secrets (BBC Two, 2019)

Katharine Gun’s whistleblowing story becomes a quietly gripping drama about conscience and consequence. Keira Knightley is superb — restrained, determined, and deeply human.

12.05am – Secrets of the Celebrity Sex Tapes (Channel 4)

The series concludes with Kim Kardashian and the birth of scandal‑as‑currency in the digital age.

Tuesday 7 July

10.00pm – The American Revolution (BBC Four)

The final episode — The Most Sacred Thing — lands with real force. A clear, confident account of the ideals that shaped a nation and still echo today.

10.40pm – The Lady in the Van (BBC One, 2015)

Maggie Smith is magnificent in Alan Bennett’s bittersweet tale.

What Bennett understands — and what this film preserves so beautifully — is that eccentricity isn’t a quirk, it’s a form of armour. Maggie Smith’s Miss Shepherd arrives on screen like a small weather system: unpredictable, sharp, and entirely uninterested in being liked. Yet Smith plays her not as a caricature of British oddity but as a woman whose stubbornness has become a survival strategy. There’s a flinty dignity in the way she occupies Bennett’s driveway, as though claiming a tiny republic of her own.

Alex Jennings, doing a double-act as Bennett’s internal and external selves, gives the film its gentle hum of self-mockery. He captures that familiar Bennett blend of wry detachment and reluctant compassion — the writer who would prefer to observe life from a safe distance but keeps finding himself drawn into its mess. Their relationship becomes a kind of slow, awkward dance: two people circling each other, neither quite willing to admit they care.

What lifts the film is its refusal to sentimentalise the situation. The humour is dry, the melancholy unforced. You feel the weight of Miss Shepherd’s past pressing through the cracks, and the way Bennett’s quiet acts of kindness accumulate almost despite himself. By the time the film reaches its final, lightly magical flourish, it feels earned — a recognition that even the most unlikely connections can leave a lasting mark.

It’s gentle, humane and quietly transformative, a story about responsibility that sneaks up on you and becomes something tender.

2.20am – Ayena (Channel 4, 2022)

A thoughtful independent drama exploring identity and expectation with sensitivity and restraint.

Wednesday 8 July

9.00pm – How to Get Filthy Rich with Gary Stevenson (Channel 4)

Stevenson brings rare clarity to discussions of wealth and inequality. Provocative, evidence‑driven and bracing.

9.00pm – Katie Price: Nothing to Hide (Sky Documentaries)

An unexpectedly intimate portrait of a figure long defined by tabloid glare. Candid, empathetic and quietly revealing.

11.10pm – Red Rooms (Film4, 2023)

A chilling psychological thriller that burrows under the skin. Cold, clinical and unsettling — a study of obsession in the digital age.

11.45pm – David Brent: Life on the Road (BBC Three, 2016)

Ricky Gervais drags his most excruciating creation back into the spotlight, and the result is a mockumentary that leans hard into the painful humour that made The Office so indelible. Brent, still clinging to the tatters of his rock‑star delusion, bankrolls a doomed tour with a band who’d clearly rather be anywhere else. It’s a familiar cocktail of bravado, desperation and toe‑curling self‑promotion — the kind of comedy where you laugh, wince, and occasionally look away.

What gives the film its pulse is the way Gervais threads moments of genuine pathos through the cringe. Brent’s loneliness is never overstated, but it’s always there: in the forced banter, the awkward silences, the way he keeps performing even when no one’s watching. The jokes land because the sadness is real, and the sadness lands because the jokes are so sharply observed.

There’s also a sly commentary on ageing ambition — the man who can’t accept that the world has moved on, still chasing the dream he sketched out in a Slough office two decades earlier. The film doesn’t redeem Brent, but it does understand him. And in that understanding, it finds something oddly touching amid the chaos, the bad gigs, and the endless, exhausting need to be loved.

Thursday 9 July

9.00pm – Bletchley Park: Codebreaker’s Forgotten Genius (BBC Four)

A deserved tribute to Gordon Welchman, whose wartime innovations shaped Allied intelligence. Thoughtful and quietly moving.

9.00pm – The Road (Great! Action, 2009)

Cormac McCarthy’s bleak novel becomes an equally stark film. Viggo Mortensen gives a remarkable performance — gaunt, haunted, fiercely protective. A difficult, powerful meditation on love and survival.

10.40pm – Elvis (BBC One, 2022)

Baz Luhrmann’s maximalist whirlwind of a biopic — loud, glittering, and absolutely determined to sweep you off your feet. It’s cinema as spectacle, every frame straining with colour, movement and musical pulse. Yet beneath the rhinestones and riotous editing, the film keeps circling back to the emotional cost of myth‑making: the boy who became the brand, the man trapped inside the legend.

Austin Butler is magnetic throughout, not just mimicking Elvis’s swagger but finding the vulnerability underneath — the hesitations, the longing, the flashes of fear when the machinery around him grows too big to control. His performance gives the film its heartbeat, grounding Luhrmann’s operatic excess in something recognisably human.

And then there’s Tom Hanks’ Colonel Parker, a grotesque carnival barker of a presence, steering the story with a sinister grin. The dynamic between Butler’s raw sincerity and Hanks’ oily manipulation becomes the film’s engine, driving it through the highs, the heartbreak, and the inevitable crash.

It’s bold, messy, and often overwhelming — but that’s the point. Luhrmann isn’t trying to tell the story of Elvis so much as recreate the sensation of him: the dazzle, the noise, the impossible momentum of a life lived in the spotlight.

Friday 10 July

8.15pm – Women of World War II: More Untold Stories (PBS America)

Important, absorbing accounts of women whose wartime contributions deserve far wider recognition.

9.40pm – Blondie in Concert (BBC Four)

Captured in Glasgow in 1979, Blondie in Concert is a time capsule of a band at the height of its powers — tight, stylish, and effortlessly cool. Debbie Harry commands the stage with icy charisma, her voice cutting through the mix with precision and attitude. The performance brims with confidence: the band knows exactly what it’s doing and how good it sounds.

What’s striking, watching it now, is how modern it feels. The rhythms, the energy, the interplay between punk edge and pop sophistication — all of it still sounds fresh. Blondie were never just a band riding a trend; they were architects of a sound that bridged worlds, bringing New York grit into the mainstream without losing its bite.

Harry’s stage presence remains magnetic. She moves with the ease of someone who understands that cool isn’t about effort; it’s about control. The camera loves her, and she knows it, but there’s no vanity — just a performer completely in command of her craft.

The Glasgow crowd, caught between awe and exhilaration, adds its own electricity. You can feel the pulse of a moment when Blondie were redefining what pop could be: sharp, stylish, and utterly alive. It’s a concert that reminds you why they mattered — and why they still do.

10.00pm – 1977: When Virginia Wade Won Wimbledon (Channel 5)

A timely look back at Britain’s last women’s singles champion as Wimbledon reaches its climax.

11.00am – Leave Her to Heaven (Film4, 1945)

Gene Tierney’s performance remains one of cinema’s great femme fatale turns. A sumptuous Technicolor noir that hides darkness beneath its glossy surface.

12.05am – Atonement (BBC Two, 2007)

Romantic, devastating and beautifully made. Joe Wright’s adaptation of Ian McEwan’s novel remains one of the finest British films of the century — a story about guilt, imagination and the long shadow of a single mistake.

Streaming

Saturday 4 July – Turn: Washington’s Spies (ITVX)

All four seasons drop at once. Jamie Bell anchors this smart, underrated drama about espionage during the American Revolution. Ideal for a long weekend binge.

Sunday 5 July – Sparks of Tomorrow (Netflix)

Weekly episodes. An imaginative anime set in an alternative twentieth century — visually striking and narratively ambitious.

Monday 6 July – Hamnet (Netflix)

Maggie O’Farrell’s novel becomes a sensitive, beautifully acted drama about grief, family and the shadows cast by genius.

Friday 10 July – Miguel Ángel Blanco: The 48 Hours That Changed Spain (Netflix)

A powerful documentary revisiting a moment that reshaped Spanish politics and united a nation.

Friday 10 July – Star City: Season Finale (Apple TV+)

The For All Mankind spin‑off reaches its Soviet‑side conclusion. Ambitious, thoughtful alternate‑history storytelling.