It is difficult to write that without remembering exactly where you were when the planes hit the World Trade Center on 11 September 2001. For those of us old enough to have watched events unfold live, the images have never quite gone away. The second aircraft. The smoke. The people standing in the streets staring upwards. Then the towers coming down.
A quarter of a century later, television and radio inevitably return to 9/11 this week. Some of the programmes revisit familiar territory, but others ask questions which remain unresolved. Panorama’s 9/11: The Saudi Connection looks at newly released material concerning possible Saudi links to the hijackers. Radio 4 hears directly from seven people caught up in the attacks. Then, on the anniversary itself, Sky History repeats 102 Minutes Inside the Towers. There are plenty of 9/11 documentaries around this week, but that one retains an immediacy which is difficult to shake off.
It isn’t all remembrance, of course.
Freddie Mercury would have turned 80 this week, prompting competing Queen nights from the BBC and Sky Arts. BBC Four gives us two episodes of one of my favourite sitcoms, The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin, while Radio 4 Extra offers its rather lovely audio reincarnation. We also get Buddy Holly, Penda’s Fen, Martha Argerich, Robert Redford, plague, crusades and enough excellent films to fill a small repertory cinema.
Quite a week, then.
Saturday 5 September
6.30pm – Waterloo (1970), ITV4
Bondarchuk’s colossal staging of Napoleon’s downfall remains one of cinema’s great acts of madness and magnificence. It isn’t just big — it’s absurdly big, the sort of logistical gamble that would give a modern producer heart palpitations. Before computers could conjure armies out of pixels, this was done the old, brutal way: thousands of real soldiers marching, charging, falling, regrouping across vast fields churned into mud.
What you get is weight — the physical heft of cavalry pounding through smoke, the chaos of infantry lines buckling and reforming, the sheer human density of a battlefield recreated at full scale. Bondarchuk doesn’t merely depict Waterloo; he tries to rebuild it.
Rod Steiger’s Napoleon is a storm of ego, exhaustion and fatal certainty, while Christopher Plummer’s Wellington watches it all with the cool detachment of a man who knows history is tilting his way. But the real star is the spectacle itself: a reminder of a vanished era when cinema occasionally attempted the impossible, and sometimes succeeded.
6.30pm – Queen Live in Rio, Sky Arts
Sky Arts gets its Queen celebrations underway early with the band in concert.
7.50pm – Queen: Is This the Real Life?, Sky Arts
A look back over Queen’s extraordinary career.
8.00pm – Captain Marvel (2019), Channel 4
Brie Larson steps into the MCU with a performance that’s flinty, poised and quietly self‑assured, anchoring Marvel’s detour into the mid‑1990s — all dial‑up modems, Blockbuster Video and grunge‑era attitude. What’s striking, revisiting it now, is how much of the film’s charm comes from its refusal to hurry. It’s less a straight‑line origin story and more a slow unravelling: a woman piecing together a life that’s been deliberately scrambled, discovering that the people who trained her may not be the people she should trust.
The buddy‑movie chemistry with Samuel L. Jackson gives the film its warmth, and the de‑aged Nick Fury — still years away from the cynicism that will calcify him — is a delight. Ben Mendelsohn’s Talos, meanwhile, steals scenes with a wry, weary humour that undercuts the usual Marvel bombast.
It’s not the studio’s flashiest entry, but it has a sturdiness and clarity of purpose that still lands. A story about reclaiming agency, wrapped in neon lighting, cosmic punch‑ups and a soundtrack that leans hard into the era.
9.00pm – Queen at the BBC, BBC Two
Freddie Mercury would have been 80, and the BBC has sensibly gone rummaging through an exceptionally rich archive.
Queen Night begins with a compilation of performances including Radio Ga Ga and Bohemian Rhapsody. There are worse ways to spend a Saturday evening.
Catch up via BBC iPlayer.
9.00pm – Freddie Mercury: The Untold Story, Sky Arts
Meanwhile, over on Sky Arts, a profile following Mercury from his arrival in Britain through Queen’s rise to global stardom and his untimely death in 1991.
9.00pm – Lorne, Sky Documentaries
A documentary about Lorne Michaels, the man behind Saturday Night Live and one of the most influential figures in American television comedy.
9.00pm – The Dark Knight Rises (2012), ITV2
Nolan closes out his Batman trilogy with a film that feels less like a sequel and more like a reckoning. Eight years after The Dark Knight, Christian Bale’s Bruce Wayne is a man hollowed out by grief and self‑imposed exile — limping, reclusive, and dangerously convinced that Gotham no longer needs him. Into that vacuum strides Tom Hardy’s Bane, a villain built like a siege engine and fuelled by a kind of militant certainty.
Hardy plays him with an unnerving calm: the voice, the posture, the deliberate pacing all suggest someone who has already decided how the story ends. He isn’t chaotic like the Joker; he’s methodical, ideological, and terrifying precisely because he believes he’s the hero of his own revolution. When he breaks Batman — physically, psychologically, symbolically — it lands with the weight of a trilogy snapping in half.
What follows is Nolan at his most operatic: a city under occupation, a hero clawing his way back from ruin, and a finale that pushes the scale to its limit without losing the emotional thread. Anne Hathaway’s Selina Kyle adds a sharp, sardonic counterpoint, and Michael Caine’s weary Alfred provides the film’s bruised heart.
It’s a grand, heavy, sometimes unwieldy conclusion — but it has conviction, and it gives Bruce Wayne something rare in superhero cinema: an ending that feels earned.
10.00pm – Queen: Live at the Hammersmith Odeon, BBC Two
Queen’s 1975 Christmas concert. The band were on the cusp of becoming absolutely enormous and you can see why.
10.20pm – Queen: Days of Our Lives, Sky Arts
Part one of the story of the band.
11.05pm – Freddie Mercury: The Final Act, BBC Two
A documentary about the final years of Mercury’s life and the extraordinary tribute concert which followed his death.
11.45pm – Apocalypse Now (1979), Film4
Coppola’s voyage upriver remains one of cinema’s great acts of delirium — a film that doesn’t simply depict madness but seems to breathe it, sweat it, and let it seep into every frame. Even after all these years, it still feels like something too large and too strange to have been made by human hands, a fever dream mounted with the resources of a major studio and the instincts of a man teetering on the edge.
What overwhelms isn’t just the scale — though the scale is astonishing — but the density of the experience. The jungle feels alive in a way few films have ever matched: humid, predatory, vibrating with unseen threat. Willard’s journey becomes a kind of moral erosion, each stop along the river stripping away another layer of certainty until all that’s left is the raw, unfiltered question of what a human being becomes when the structures around him collapse.
And then there’s Kurtz, waiting in the shadows like a myth that’s grown teeth. Brando’s presence is so heavy, so strange, that the film seems to tilt around him. The final stretch plays less like narrative and more like ritual — a confrontation staged in whispers, firelight and the oppressive heat of a world where sanity has long since evaporated.
12 midnight – Brighton Rock (2010), BBC One
The later adaptation of Graham Greene’s novel arrives with a chill already in its bones. Sam Riley’s Pinkie is a quieter, more coiled presence than earlier incarnations — a young man whose menace comes not from swagger but from an unnerving stillness, as if violence is simply the next breath he hasn’t yet taken.
Setting the story in the 1960s gives the film a different texture: the Mods-and-Rockers backdrop adds a restless, volatile energy, and Brighton itself feels less like a seaside escape and more like a pressure cooker. The pier, the backstreets, the cafés — all of them carry that Greene sense of moral rot just beneath the surface.
Andrea Riseborough’s Rose is heartbreakingly sincere, clinging to Pinkie with a devotion that feels both tender and tragic. Her innocence isn’t played as naivety but as a kind of doomed hope, which makes the story’s darker turns land with real weight. Helen Mirren, as Ida, brings a sharp, worldly counterpoint — a woman who sees exactly what Pinkie is and refuses to let the truth slip quietly away.
It’s a lean, shadowed film, faithful to Greene’s bleak worldview and carried by Riley’s icy restraint. Not as iconic as the 1947 version, but it has its own grim pulse.
12.20am – Freddie Mercury: The Great Pretender, Sky Arts
Another opportunity to explore the man behind one of rock music’s greatest showmen.
12.35am – Freddie Mercury: In Ten Pictures, BBC Two
Mercury’s life examined through a small collection of professional and private photographs.
12.45am – A Quiet Place Part II (2020), Channel 4
Krasinski’s sequel doesn’t try to reinvent the wheel — it simply tightens every bolt. The world is already broken, the rules already established, and the film wastes no time reminding you how lethal a single careless sound can be. What follows is a lean, tense continuation that expands the story without diluting its simplicity.
Emily Blunt carries the film with that same fierce, exhausted determination, but it’s Millicent Simmonds who becomes the emotional centre this time — resourceful, brave, and increasingly convinced that survival requires more than hiding. Cillian Murphy adds a welcome layer of ambiguity: a man hollowed out by loss, dragged reluctantly back into responsibility.
The monsters remain terrifying not because of what they look like, but because of what they demand: absolute silence, absolute vigilance, absolute awareness of every twig, tile and loose grain of gravel. Krasinski stages the set‑pieces with surgical precision — parallel action, rising dread, and that awful knowledge that one mistake is all it takes.
Sunday 6 September
6.00pm – BBC Proms: American Classics, BBC Two
The penultimate weekend of the Proms offers a concert recorded before a capacity audience at the Royal Albert Hall on 24 August.
Copland’s nostalgic Appalachian Spring sits alongside Bernstein’s Symphonic Dances from West Side Story and Gershwin’s glorious Rhapsody in Blue. Quite a mixture, but a very enjoyable one.
Catch up via BBC iPlayer.
6.40pm – Steel Magnolias (1989), Film4
A film that wears its warmth openly but never hides the steel underneath. Steel Magnolias begins as a portrait of Southern friendship — all teasing, gossip, hairspray and ritual — and slowly reveals itself as something far deeper: a study of resilience, community and the way women hold each other up when life turns cruel.
The beauty salon is the film’s emotional engine, a place where laughter ricochets off the walls and where heartbreak is absorbed gently, almost ceremonially. It’s a sanctuary, but not a sentimental one; these women know exactly how hard life can be, and they meet it with humour sharp enough to cut through the darkest moments.
The cast is extraordinary, and the chemistry is the reason the film still lands. Sally Field’s ferocious maternal love, Shirley MacLaine’s acerbic brilliance, Dolly Parton’s effortless warmth, Olympia Dukakis’ regal wit, Daryl Hannah’s gentle awkwardness and Julia Roberts’ luminous vulnerability — each performance distinct, yet perfectly interlocking.
What begins as a breezy comedy becomes, almost imperceptibly, a story of grief handled with honesty rather than manipulation. The emotional blow, when it comes, is devastating precisely because the film has earned it. And by the end, you’re left with something rare: a sense that you’ve spent time with real people, whose laughter and sorrow feel lived rather than performed.
7.00pm – Paths of Glory (1957), Great Action
Kubrick’s blistering anti‑war drama still hits like a moral thunderclap. On the surface it’s a First World War story — mud, trenches, impossible orders handed down by men who will never see the front — but what the film is really dissecting is the machinery of authority, and how easily it grinds ordinary soldiers into dust.
Kirk Douglas gives one of his finest performances as Colonel Dax, a man trying to hold onto decency in a system that treats human lives as expendable chess pieces. His fury isn’t theatrical; it’s the quiet, exhausted anger of someone who understands exactly how rigged the game is. Opposite him, the generals are drawn with icy precision: men who speak of honour while sending others to die for their own vanity.
The courtroom scenes remain devastating — Kubrick strips away sentiment and lets the cruelty stand naked. And the final moments, often discussed, still carry a strange, fragile humanity: a reminder that even in the bleakest circumstances, people can recognise each other’s suffering.
8.00pm – BBC Proms, BBC Four
A major attraction of this year’s Proms: the great Martha Argerich, now 85, performs Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 2 with the Munich Philharmonic under Lahav Shani.
Katie Derham and Petroc Trelawny present.
Catch up via BBC iPlayer.
10.00pm – Peter Egan Remembers A Taste of Honey, BBC Four
Peter Egan looks back at the BBC’s 1984 adaptation of Shelagh Delaney’s groundbreaking play.
10.00pm – Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969), BBC Two
Newman and Redford at their most effortlessly magnetic — two men who seem to glide through the film on charm, wit and a kind of doomed buoyancy. What’s striking, watching it again, is how lightly the film carries its melancholy. It’s a story about outlaws who know the world is changing faster than they can outrun it, yet it never collapses into gloom; instead, it leans into the pleasure of their partnership, the banter, the mischief, the sheer joy of watching two actors who understand exactly how to play off each other.
George Roy Hill’s direction gives the film its easy swing: sun‑bleached landscapes, comic detours, sudden bursts of danger, all stitched together with a confidence that feels almost casual. Katherine Ross adds a quiet, steady grace, and Burt Bacharach’s score — yes, including that song — gives the film its unmistakable, slightly off‑beat flavour.
It’s one of those rare films where likability isn’t a surface trait but the whole engine. You enjoy spending time with these men even as you sense the walls closing in. And when the final freeze‑frame arrives, it feels less like an ending and more like a salute.
10.15pm – A Taste of Honey, BBC Four
The 1984 television adaptation itself.
11.00pm – United 93 (2006), Channel 5
Paul Greengrass’s restrained and deeply unsettling account of United Airlines Flight 93. Twenty-five years on from 9/11, this is not comfortable viewing. Nor should it be.
11.45pm – Siân Phillips Remembers Under Milk Wood, BBC Four
Siân Phillips looks back at the various adaptations of Dylan Thomas’s extraordinary work.
11.50pm – Let’s Get Lost (1988), Talking Pictures TV
Bruce Weber’s beautiful, melancholy documentary about jazz trumpeter Chet Baker.
11.55pm – Under Milk Wood, BBC Four
A star-studded performance of Dylan Thomas’s great radio play.
1.00am – Bombshell (2019), Channel 4
A sharp, unsettling drama that turns a real‑world scandal into something tense, propulsive and uncomfortably intimate. Charlize Theron, Nicole Kidman and Margot Robbie form a formidable trio — each playing a woman navigating the toxic, paranoid ecosystem of Fox News at the height of the Roger Ailes sexual‑harassment revelations.
Theron’s transformation into Megyn Kelly is astonishing: the voice, the posture, the brittle self‑possession of someone who knows exactly how dangerous her workplace has become. Kidman brings a weary defiance as Gretchen Carlson, the first to risk everything by speaking out. And Robbie, as a composite character, gives the film its emotional core — a young woman dazzled by the promise of success, only to discover the cost of entry.
The film moves with the pace of a thriller, but its impact comes from the small, human moments: the whispered warnings, the coded conversations, the way fear shapes behaviour long before anyone says a word. It’s slick, angry, and unafraid to show how institutions protect power at the expense of the people inside them.
1.05am – Mothering Sunday (2021), Film4
A quiet, elegant adaptation of Graham Swift’s novel, with Odessa Young, Josh O’Connor and Olivia Colman.
Monday 7 September
6.40pm – Besieged Fortresses: Legendary Battles, PBS America
The first of four programmes begins in 1190. Philip II of France and Richard the Lionheart head for the Holy Land during the Third Crusade, with the fortified city of Acre among their objectives.
8.00pm – Panorama: 9/11: The Saudi Connection, BBC One
Twenty-five years after 9/11, questions remain.
Jane McMullen examines newly released documents suggesting that people working for Saudi Arabia may have played a role in assisting the plotters. The Saudi government denies involvement, but a US judge has ruled that a case brought by victims’ families against the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia may proceed.
Particular attention falls on Omar al-Bayoumi, who was questioned by British police, and on the uncomfortable question of why potentially important evidence remained hidden for so long.
Catch up via BBC iPlayer.
11.05pm – A Thousand and One (2023), BBC Two
Teyana Taylor is extraordinary here — fierce, wounded, tender, and utterly convincing as Inez, a woman trying to carve out a life with her son in a New York that keeps shifting beneath her feet. A.V. Rockwell’s film isn’t just a character study; it’s a portrait of a city in flux, where gentrification, policing and poverty quietly reshape the possibilities available to ordinary people.
What gives the film its power is the intimacy of the storytelling. It’s built from small, lived‑in moments: cramped apartments, street corners that feel both dangerous and familiar, the fragile routines that hold a family together. Taylor plays Inez with a kind of combustible love — protective to the point of ferocity, yet always aware that the world is bigger and harsher than she can control.
Josiah Cross, as her son Terry, brings a quiet intelligence that deepens the film’s emotional pull. Their relationship evolves in ways that feel painfully real: affection, frustration, loyalty, secrets, all shaped by the pressures of a city that doesn’t care who they are or what they’re trying to build.
11.10pm – Testament of Youth (2014), BBC One
Vera Brittain’s First World War memoir reaches the screen with Alicia Vikander in the central role.
Tuesday 8 September
6.40pm – Besieged Fortresses: Legendary Battles, PBS America
Part two of four: Rhodes: The Ultimate Battle.
9.00pm – The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin, BBC Four
One of my favourite sitcoms of all time.
Reggie Perrin works at Sunshine Desserts and appears, from the outside, to be an ordinary suburban middle-aged man. Inside, though, everything is beginning to come apart.
David Nobbs’s writing produces a particular kind of bewitching oddity. The commuter train excuses. CJ. The hippopotamus. Reggie’s increasingly desperate attempts to escape the conventions of work and family life. It is surreal without ever forgetting that there is something rather sad underneath it all.
And Leonard Rossiter is simply magnificent.
The opening episode was first shown exactly 50 years ago.
Catch up via BBC iPlayer.
9.30pm – The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin, BBC Four
The second episode takes us further into Reggie’s considerably kookier family.
If you’ve never seen the series, start here. If you have, you probably don’t need convincing.
10.00pm – Timewatch: The Killer Wave of 1607, BBC Four
In January 1607, a huge wave devastated parts of the Bristol Channel coastline. Was it simply an exceptional storm surge, or was Britain struck by a tsunami?
11.05pm – Gosford Park (2001), BBC Two
Robert Altman’s Gosford Park remains one of the most elegant dissections of class ever put on screen—a country‑house murder mystery that treats the whodunnit as the least interesting thing happening. What makes the film endure is its extraordinary sense of observation. Altman isn’t interested in the aristocrats’ theatrics so much as the quiet, relentless labour happening below stairs: the servants who see everything, absorb everything, and are granted none of the power that comes from knowledge. The ensemble cast is absurdly good—Maggie Smith firing off barbs like a sporting event, Helen Mirren and Kelly Macdonald giving the downstairs world its emotional spine, and Clive Owen gliding through the film with a kind of dangerous stillness. Julian Fellowes’ script lays the groundwork for Downton Abbey, but Altman’s direction keeps it sharper, funnier, and far more cynical. It’s a film about performance—social, emotional, hierarchical—and the murder becomes simply another mask slipping. Even twenty‑five years on, Gosford Park feels effortlessly precise: a beautifully calibrated satire wrapped in a country‑house classic.
1.40am – The Black Book (1949), Talking Pictures TV
Anthony Mann’s Reign of Terror — retitled The Black Book for reasons known only to distributors — is one of those fascinating hybrids Hollywood occasionally produced: a French Revolution thriller shot like a hard‑boiled noir. The guillotine may loom over the plot, but the mood is pure shadowy intrigue, all sharp angles, suspicious glances and danger lurking in every alleyway.
Mann treats revolutionary France less as a historical setting and more as a pressure chamber. Robespierre’s reign becomes a kind of proto‑gangster empire, complete with secret lists, double‑crosses and a city where trust is a luxury no one can afford. Richard Basehart’s Robespierre is icy and implacable, while Robert Cummings and Arlene Dahl navigate the plot with the wary alertness of people who know one wrong move means the blade.
It’s brisk, atmospheric and surprisingly tense — a political thriller dressed in period costume, shot with the same muscular precision Mann would later bring to his westerns. A curio, yes, but a stylish and gripping one.
Wednesday 9 September
11.45am – The Monkey’s Paw (1948), Talking Pictures TV
A compact little chiller built around one of the great cautionary tales: the seductive danger of getting exactly what you asked for. This adaptation leans into the story’s creaking‑floorboard atmosphere — a modest British production that understands the power of suggestion, dread and the slow tightening of fate.
The plot is simple enough: a family receives a mysterious talisman said to grant wishes, and discovers — with mounting horror — that every gift arrives twisted, corrupted, and paid for in full. What the film captures so well is the creeping inevitability of it all. Each wish feels like a step down a staircase you can’t climb back up, and the characters’ growing desperation gives the story its grim momentum.
It’s a reminder of why W.W. Jacobs’ tale endures. The fear isn’t in monsters or shadows, but in the awful realisation that the worst thing that can happen is not being denied what you want — but getting it.
6.40pm – Besieged Fortresses: Legendary Battles, PBS America
Part three of four: The Great Siege of Malta.
9.00pm – Britain’s Forgotten Girls, BBC Two
A difficult but important documentary.
Through survivors, whistleblowers and people who tried to raise the alarm, it examines why young girls across Britain continue to be groomed, trafficked and sexually exploited by organised drug gangs.
Authorities have been warned repeatedly over two decades. The disturbing question is why so many of the same failures continue.
9.00pm – Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri (2017), Film4
Martin McDonagh’s Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri remains one of the most bracing pieces of American cinema of the last decade—a film that starts with fury and never quite lets you settle. Frances McDormand’s performance is the anchor: a mother weaponising grief with a kind of flinty determination that feels both heroic and deeply uncomfortable. The billboards themselves—three stark red slabs demanding justice—become a moral battleground, pulling the town into a spiral of recrimination, guilt and unintended consequences. McDonagh’s great trick is refusing to give anyone clean lines. The characters are messy, contradictory, sometimes appalling, sometimes tender, and the film insists on sitting with that complexity rather than smoothing it into a neat arc. Sam Rockwell’s arc, in particular, is a study in how people can be both monstrous and capable of change, often in the same breath. It’s a darkly comic drama, but the humour is barbed, arriving in the cracks between pain rather than as relief. Even now, the film feels like a provocation—an invitation to consider how anger can illuminate, distort and, occasionally, transform. A midnight‑black comedy with real moral weight.
10.00pm – Tommy Robinson: Where’s the Money Gone?, Channel 4
Following the previous week’s programme on Reform and with political tensions running high, Dispatches reporter Matt Shea turns his attention to Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, better known as Tommy Robinson.
Shea has spent a year looking into his finances and asks some serious questions about where the money surrounding his campaigning comes from and where it goes.
10.15pm – Penda’s Fen, BBC Four
Now this is something special.
In the last summer before adulthood, the puritanical son of a village parson finds his certainties about religion, politics, sexuality and Englishness disturbed by homoerotic visions and supernatural apparitions.
Among those apparitions are the pagan King Penda and, because this is Penda’s Fen and ordinary rules have long since stopped applying, Edward Elgar.
Strange, provocative and unique.
Catch up via BBC iPlayer.
11.20pm – Boiling Point (2021), Film4
Stephen Graham is blisteringly good in this one‑shot pressure‑cooker drama set over a single night in a London restaurant, where every frayed nerve and bad decision hits at once. The film’s power comes from its relentlessness: orders pile up, tempers flare, mistakes snowball, and the camera refuses to look away. What starts as controlled chaos slowly unravels into something rawer and more revealing, exposing the exhaustion, ego and quiet desperation behind the pass. It’s tense, immersive and brilliantly acted.
4.25pm – A Room with a View (1985), Film4
Merchant Ivory at their most elegant and assured — a film that seems to float, all sunlight, longing and the quiet ache of English restraint. What makes it endure isn’t just the beauty (though Florence is captured with such adoration it feels almost like a character in its own right), but the way it balances romance with wit, social observation with genuine emotional clarity.
Helena Bonham Carter, still early in her career, gives Lucy Honeychurch a luminous uncertainty — a young woman pulled between propriety and desire, between the world she’s been taught to inhabit and the one she glimpses when she’s finally allowed to breathe. Julian Sands’ George Emerson is the perfect counterpoint: open, idealistic, a man who refuses to apologise for feeling deeply.
Around them, the supporting cast is a small constellation of British greats. Maggie Smith’s Charlotte Bartlett is a masterpiece of flustered repression; Judi Dench brings warmth and curiosity; Daniel Day‑Lewis is hilariously, painfully precise as the priggish Cecil Vyse.
It’s one of those films that feels like a holiday for the soul — gentle, funny, romantic, and touched with just enough melancholy to make the joy matter.
9.00pm – Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969), BBC Four
Another chance to bask in one of cinema’s great double‑acts before the channel shifts its spotlight solely onto Redford later in the evening. What’s remarkable, revisiting it yet again, is how effortlessly the film still charms. Newman and Redford don’t just play Butch and Sundance — they embody a kind of easy, loping camaraderie that feels almost mythic now, two men moving through the West with wit as quick as their draw.
The film’s pleasures are deceptively simple: the banter, the sun‑drenched landscapes, the way danger seems to arrive with a shrug rather than a drumroll. Yet beneath the breeziness sits a quiet melancholy. These are outlaws out of time, men whose world is shrinking even as they grin their way through it.
George Roy Hill stitches comedy, romance and impending doom together with astonishing lightness. Katherine Ross brings a gentle steadiness, and Burt Bacharach’s score adds that unmistakable, slightly off‑centre charm that has become part of the film’s DNA.
BBC Four showing it as a prelude to their Redford focus feels right. It’s the film that made him a star, and the one that still shows why.
9.00pm – The Great Plague: The Village That Saved Britain, Channel 5
Historian Ruth Goodman tells the extraordinary story of Eyam in Derbyshire.
In 1665 the young parish priest William Mompesson helped introduce drastic measures intended to prevent bubonic plague spreading from the village into surrounding communities.
It was an act of remarkable collective courage. The price was appalling. Over 14 months, 258 villagers died.
Archaeologist Raksha Dave contributes on the science, while AI-generated imagery is used to recreate aspects of the story.
Catch up via Channel 5 streaming.
9.00pm – The Ladykillers (1955), Great TV
The original, the real deal, and still one of Ealing’s most wickedly delightful comedies. Accept no substitutes indeed — because nothing matches the peculiar, irresistible charm of Alec Guinness leading a gang of hopeless criminals who find themselves outwitted, out‑maneuvered and ultimately undone by one elderly landlady with impeccable manners and an unshakeable moral compass.
Guinness is a marvel here: all hollow cheeks, sinister politeness and a smile that looks like it’s been sharpened rather than worn. His Professor Marcus is both absurd and unsettling, a criminal mastermind whose “mastery” collapses the moment reality intrudes. Around him, the gang — Peter Sellers, Herbert Lom, Cecil Parker and Danny Green — form a perfect comic ensemble, each one a different flavour of incompetence.
And then there’s Katie Johnson as Mrs Wilberforce, the film’s beating heart. She’s gentle, devout, slightly bewildered by the world, yet possessed of a quiet, immovable strength that the criminals never see coming. Her scenes with the gang are miniature comic miracles: polite conversation layered over rising panic, civility clashing with criminal intent.
The whole thing is a masterclass in tone — dark but never cruel, whimsical but never weightless. Ealing at its finest, and a reminder that sometimes the sweetest characters are the ones you should fear most.
10.45pm – Talking Pictures: Robert Redford, BBC Four
Following Butch Cassidy, a timely look at the life and career of Robert Redford.
12 midnight – Belfast (2021), BBC Two
Branagh’s semi‑autobiographical film is shaped with the clarity of memory rather than the precision of reportage — a childhood seen in flashes of fear, humour, confusion and love. It’s a story about the Troubles, yes, but told from the height of a small boy, which means the violence arrives as something both terrifying and strangely distant, a disruption to the rhythms of ordinary life rather than a political thesis.
Jude Hill is wonderful as young Buddy, all wide‑eyed curiosity and worry, trying to make sense of a world that suddenly feels unstable. Around him, Branagh assembles a superb ensemble: Caitríona Balfe and Jamie Dornan as parents trying to hold the family together; Judi Dench and Ciarán Hinds offering warmth, wisdom and the kind of quiet resilience that becomes the film’s emotional anchor.
Shot in luminous black‑and‑white, the film has a gentle, reflective tone — not nostalgic exactly, but tender, as if Branagh is sifting through the fragments of his own past with care. The music, the humour, the sense of community under strain: it all builds into a portrait of a city and a family trying to stay whole when the world around them fractures.
12.55am – Radical (2021), Film4
A quietly gripping drama built around a simple, potent idea: what happens when a teacher decides that the system has failed his students, and chooses to tear up the rulebook rather than keep pretending it works. Eugenio Derbez gives one of his strongest dramatic performances as Sergio, a man teaching in a neglected Mexican border town where resources are scarce, futures feel pre‑written, and hope is something children learn not to rely on.
What makes the film land is its sincerity. It isn’t a glossy “inspirational teacher” story; it’s grounded in the realities of poverty, corruption and institutional neglect. The classroom scenes have real spark — messy, funny, unpredictable — and the film takes care to show how Sergio’s unconventional methods aren’t magic, but a lifeline that gives his students permission to think beyond survival.
The children themselves are superb, especially Jennifer Trejo as Paloma, whose intelligence is both a gift and a burden. Her storyline gives the film its emotional weight, reminding you that talent means nothing without opportunity.
Radical is earnest, humane and quietly political — a film about education as resistance, and about the small acts of belief that can change a child’s trajectory.
1.00pm – Cowboy (1958), Legend
A wonderfully off‑beat western that pairs Glenn Ford’s seasoned trail boss with Jack Lemmon’s city‑bred hotel clerk, creating one of the genre’s most enjoyable odd couples. What begins as a clash of temperament — Ford’s dry, no‑nonsense professionalism versus Lemmon’s eager, slightly deluded romanticism about frontier life — slowly becomes a story about respect earned the hard way.
Ford is superb: calm, flinty, carrying the authority of a man who’s seen everything the West can throw at him. Lemmon, meanwhile, brings that unmistakable blend of comic timing and emotional sincerity, charting a transformation from naïve dreamer to someone who understands the grit behind the myth.
Delmer Daves directs with a light touch, letting the humour and character work sit alongside the harsher realities of cattle‑drive life — storms, stampedes, long nights, and the constant negotiation of pride. It’s a western that’s less about gunfights and more about the slow forging of character.
A smart, charming film, and a reminder of how good Lemmon could be when he stepped outside comedy and into the dust and danger of the frontier.
9.00pm – 102 Minutes Inside the Towers, Sky History
There is a raft of television marking the 25th anniversary of 9/11. Each programme approaches it differently and each, in its own way, is haunting.
But spare some time for this one.
Using footage recorded by people in and around the World Trade Center between the first impact and the collapse of the second tower, 102 Minutes Inside the Towers strips away much of the retrospective commentary. You experience events through those who were actually there.
Today is the anniversary itself.
Catch up via NOW.
9.00pm – Layer Cake (2004), Great Action
Daniel Craig’s pre‑Bond calling card, and still one of the sharpest British crime films of the 2000s — sleek, cynical and very aware that the drug trade isn’t glamorous, just exhausting. Craig’s unnamed protagonist (the film’s great joke: he’s a man who prides himself on having no myth) is a successful, discreet cocaine middleman who believes he can simply retire, step away, and let the chaos continue without him.
Naturally, the universe — and several very dangerous people — have other ideas. Matthew Vaughn directs with a cool, clipped confidence, stitching together a world where every favour is a trap, every ally is temporary, and every “simple job” hides three more complications. The tone is pure modern noir: stylish but never cartoonish, violent but never indulgent, and threaded with a dry humour that keeps the tension taut.
Craig is superb: calm, calculating, already carrying the weary elegance that would make him such a compelling Bond. Around him, the cast is a murderer’s row of British talent — Colm Meaney, Michael Gambon, Sienna Miller, Tom Hardy — all circling like sharks with competing agendas.
9.05pm – Peeping Tom (1960), Talking Pictures TV
Michael Powell’s masterpiece, and one of the most notorious cases of a film being punished for seeing too clearly. On release it was treated as a kind of cinematic crime — critics savaged it, audiences recoiled, and Powell’s British career was effectively destroyed overnight. Time, thankfully, has done what the moment could not: recognised it as a bold, unsettling, brilliantly crafted study of voyeurism, trauma and the act of filmmaking itself.
Carl Boehm’s Mark Lewis is one of the great disturbing screen presences: gentle, polite, almost shy, yet carrying a private horror he can neither escape nor fully understand. Powell shoots his world with a clinical precision that feels decades ahead of its time — a film about looking, about being looked at, and about the violence that can hide inside the frame.
What makes Peeping Tom so extraordinary now is how modern it feels. Its questions about spectatorship, exploitation and the ethics of the camera are sharper than ever, and its blend of psychological depth and formal daring remains astonishing.
A film once condemned as obscene now stands as one of the essential works of British cinema — visionary, unsettling, and impossible to forget.
10.30pm – Buddy Holly Night, BBC Four
Buddy Holly would have turned 90 this week.
One of the founding fathers of rock and roll, his recording career lasted for an almost absurdly short time, yet his influence runs through everything that followed.
BBC Four begins with an Arena documentary first shown in 1985. Members of the Crickets appear alongside contemporaries the Everly Brothers and famous admirers including Paul McCartney and Keith Richards, both of whom acknowledge Holly as a formative influence.
It is followed by Arena’s 1993 film Peggy Sue: Tales of Rock ’n’ Roll, in which Peggy Sue Gerron Rackham, the woman whose name became immortalised in one of Holly’s best-loved songs, takes a revealing trip down memory lane.
Catch up via BBC iPlayer.
Streaming Choices
Netflix – The Secret Woman
Available now
A tense, stylish Danish thriller that folds domestic unease into full‑blown psychological danger. When a seemingly ordinary woman begins to suspect that her carefully curated life is being manipulated, the story shifts from quiet paranoia to something far more dangerous. It’s sleek, modern Nordic noir: clipped dialogue, cold interiors, and a slow tightening of dread as secrets begin to surface. Claes Bang and Natalie Madueño give the drama its bite — two performances built on charm, menace and the fear of what people hide behind respectability.
Netflix – The Whisper Man
Available now
A dark, atmospheric thriller adapted from Alex North’s bestselling novel, steeped in small‑town unease and the lingering trauma of past crimes. When a father and son move to a quiet village hoping for a fresh start, they find themselves drawn into the echo of an old case — a series of disappearances linked to a killer known only as “The Whisper Man.”
The film leans into dread rather than spectacle: creaking houses, half‑open doors, and the unsettling sense that danger is already inside the frame. Robert De Niro, Michelle Monaghan and Adam Scott anchor the story with performances that balance grief, suspicion and the fear of repeating history. It’s tense, moody and built around the idea that the past never stays buried — it waits, whispering.
BBC iPlayer – Dolly Parton: Here I Am
Available now
A warm, generous and surprisingly intimate documentary that traces Dolly Parton’s rise from rural Tennessee to global icon, treating her not as a myth but as a working artist whose discipline, humour and sheer creative drive shaped one of the most remarkable careers in music. The film moves through the milestones — the Porter Wagoner years, the songwriting breakthroughs, the pop‑country crossover, the business empire — but always returns to the woman at the centre: sharp, funny, self‑aware, and endlessly committed to the craft.
It’s packed with performance clips, interviews and behind‑the‑scenes glimpses that show how Dolly built her persona not as a mask, but as a kind of armour: glittering, witty, and entirely on her own terms. A celebration of resilience, reinvention and the power of storytelling.
Netflix – Anora
Available from Thursday 3 September
Sean Baker’s Palme d’Or winner arrives on Netflix with all the electricity that’s made it the most talked‑about American indie of the year — a raw, funny, bruising portrait of love, money and the brutal power dynamics that sit beneath both. Mikey Madison is extraordinary as Anora, a Brooklyn stripper whose whirlwind marriage to the son of a Russian oligarch detonates into chaos when the family decides to “fix” the situation.
Baker shoots with his trademark mix of neon‑lit glamour and street‑level grit, letting the film swing between tenderness and panic as Anora fights to hold onto the one thing she believes is finally hers. It’s fast, messy, humane and often very funny — a film that understands how desire and desperation can blur into each other when the world keeps reminding you of your place.
Netflix – Fauda, Season 5
Available from Tuesday 8 September
The Israeli thriller returns for a fifth season. Doron heads to Marseille to go deep undercover after an old friend goes rogue on a revenge mission.
Netflix – Untold: Mr. T, I Pity the Fool
Available from Tuesday 8 September
Netflix’s Untold series has always thrived on the tension between myth and man, but Untold: Mr. T, I Pity the Fool may be the first instalment where the myth is so enormous, so neon‑lit and so culturally baked‑in, that the documentary has to work twice as hard to remind us there’s a human being underneath the gold chains. Fortunately, it succeeds—mostly because Mr. T himself remains one of the most compelling personalities American pop culture has ever produced.
The film charts the rise of Laurence Tureaud from Chicago’s tough South Side to global icon status, and it does so with a pace and swagger that mirrors its subject. The early sections—his childhood, his stint as a bodyguard, the creation of the now‑legendary mohawk—are handled with a brisk confidence. Netflix knows these beats are familiar, but it also knows they’re irresistible. Mr. T’s origin story has the flavour of folklore: the bullied kid who reinvented himself as a walking symbol of strength, discipline and defiance.
Where the documentary becomes genuinely absorbing is in its exploration of the contradictions that made Mr. T so magnetic. He was a cartoonish tough guy who preached kindness. A symbol of brute force who refused to swear. A man who wore more gold than a Bond villain but spoke constantly about humility, faith and responsibility. The film doesn’t shy away from the paradox, and that’s where it finds its emotional weight.
The A‑Team era is, of course, the centrepiece. The documentary treats it as both a cultural explosion and a personal crucible. Mr. T’s fame was colossal—merchandise, catchphrases, talk‑show appearances, the whole 1980s media circus—but the film is careful to show the toll it took. There’s a particularly strong section on his battle with cancer, which is handled with dignity and without sentimentality. It’s here that the documentary earns its place in the Untold canon: the mask slips, the myth pauses, and the man speaks plainly.
Stylistically, this is one of the more polished Untold entries. The editing is sharp, the archive footage is well‑chosen, and the talking‑head interviews are refreshingly free of the usual nostalgia‑drunk hyperbole. The filmmakers seem to understand that Mr. T doesn’t need embellishment. He’s already larger than life; the trick is to bring him back down to human scale without losing the fun.
If there’s a flaw, it’s that the documentary occasionally feels too reverent. Mr. T’s career had misfires, oddities and outright disasters—some of which are touched on, but none lingered on long enough to give a full picture. The Be Somebody… or Be Somebody’s Fool! era, for instance, is ripe for deeper exploration. Still, the film’s generosity of spirit matches its subject, and that’s hard to begrudge.
Ultimately, Untold: Mr. T, I Pity the Fool is a warm, engaging and surprisingly thoughtful portrait of a man who became a symbol. It reminds us why Mr. T mattered—and why he still does. In an age of performative toughness and empty bravado, he remains the real deal: a man who turned strength into a moral stance, kindness into a brand, and a catchphrase into a philosophy.
ITVX – Poldark
All five series available from Thursday 10 September
Rewatching Poldark in 2026 is a reminder of just how confidently ITV can still deliver a sweeping, old‑fashioned epic when it chooses to. The show arrived in 2015 with the kind of cultural noise usually reserved for prestige imports, but what made it stick wasn’t the hype—it was the sincerity. Across five series, Poldark commits fully to being a romantic, political, windswept melodrama, and that commitment is precisely why it works.
The early episodes remain the strongest: Ross returning from the American War of Independence to a Cornwall hollowed out by poverty, corruption and grief. It’s a classic setup, but the execution is sharp. Aidan Turner’s performance anchors the whole thing—he plays Ross as a man permanently at war with himself, torn between duty, pride and a stubborn refusal to accept the world as it is. The series never pretends he’s flawless; instead, it leans into his contradictions, which gives the drama a welcome grit beneath the gloss.
What really elevates Poldark, though, is its sense of place. Cornwall isn’t just a backdrop—it’s a character. The mines, the cliffs, the storms, the constant battle between human ambition and unforgiving landscape: it’s all woven into the storytelling with a confidence that feels almost novelistic. The show’s political threads—class conflict, workers’ rights, the brutality of early industrial capitalism—are handled with more bite than you’d expect from a Sunday‑night drama. It’s romantic, yes, but never soft‑headed.
As the series progresses, the tone shifts into broader, more operatic territory. Some storylines sprawl, some villains twirl their moustaches a little too enthusiastically, and the emotional stakes occasionally tip into excess. But even at its most heightened, Poldark retains a sincerity that keeps it grounded. The relationship between Ross and Demelza is the show’s spine, and Eleanor Tomlinson’s performance gives it warmth, wit and a moral clarity that often outshines the hero himself.
Five series is a long run for a period drama, but Poldark earns it. The final episodes land with genuine emotional weight, tying together themes of loyalty, justice and the cost of idealism. It’s not perfect—few long‑form dramas are—but it remains one of ITV’s most confident achievements of the last decade: lush, political, romantic and defiantly old‑school in the best possible way.
Channel 4 Streaming – Walter Presents: The 12: Botox Murders
All eight episodes available from Friday 11 September
A Belgian courtroom drama based around the mureder of a famous author and his pregnant wife.
Apple TV – Dark Matter, Season 2, Episode 3
Available Friday 11 September
Episode 3 tightens the season’s focus on consequences and identity, pushing Jason into increasingly unstable territory while giving Daniela her strongest material yet. The multiverse concept is used less as spectacle and more as psychological pressure, with alternate selves acting as uncomfortable mirrors rather than sci‑fi gimmicks. Visually, the episode leans into controlled unease—clean Apple TV+ precision with subtle distortions that keep everything slightly off‑centre.
It’s a quieter instalment, but a pivotal one: tense, thoughtful and loaded with implications for the rest of the season.
Leaving Soon
Channel 4 – Midnight Run
Available until Tuesday 8 September
A warning worth heeding. If you haven’t seen Robert De Niro and Charles Grodin in one of the great odd-couple road movies, this is the moment.
Radio
Sunday 6 September
10.00am – The Reunion, BBC Radio 4
Another contribution to the 25th-anniversary coverage of 9/11, and potentially one of the most moving.
From New York, Kirsty Wark talks to seven people whose lives became entwined with the attacks. History is often discussed through politicians, decisions and statistics. The Reunion works differently. It gives the microphone back to the people who were actually there.
1.30pm – The Return of the Youth Club, BBC Radio 4
Youth services have taken an extraordinary battering since 2010.
This programme looks at what disappeared along with them and asks whether the Government’s proposed £500 million investment can revive a sector which once provided friendship, structure, opportunity and somewhere to go for generations of young people.
Monday 7 September
3.00pm – The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin, BBC Radio 4 Extra
The first half of the streamlined 2022 audio adaptation by Jon Canter.
Simon Greenall returns and David Haig proves himself a Rossiter for our times.
I love the original television series, so adaptations have quite a standard to meet. This delightful two-part homage manages it without merely impersonating what came before.
Tuesday 8 September
3.00pm – The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin, BBC Radio 4 Extra
Part two.
Very much worth hearing if you retain the same affection for Reggie and Sunshine Desserts that I do.
4.00pm – Last Frames: The Story of Bill Biggart, BBC Radio 4
Photographer Bill Biggart headed towards the World Trade Center with his cameras as others were fleeing.
He died when the second tower collapsed.
The photographs recovered afterwards provide an extraordinary visual record of his final hours and of the catastrophe he was determined to document.
Wednesday 9 September
3.00pm and 9.00pm – Posters of Montmartre, BBC Radio 4 Extra
A richly atmospheric wander through the artistic soul of Paris, using the posters of Montmartre as a doorway into the district’s bohemian past. Rather than treating them as decorative relics, the programme understands them as living fragments of a neighbourhood that once thrummed with cabaret energy, creative rebellion and the kind of nightlife that shaped entire artistic movements.
What emerges is a portrait of Montmartre as both muse and marketplace — a place where performers, painters and provocateurs advertised themselves with bold colours, exaggerated poses and a flair that still feels modern. These posters become tiny time capsules: glimpses of smoky cafés, crowded dance halls, and the swagger of artists who knew how to sell a fantasy.
It’s a gentle, evocative listen, perfect for anyone who enjoys cultural history told with warmth and curiosity. A reminder that sometimes the most revealing stories of a city aren’t found in its monuments, but pasted to its walls.
