For full TV listings for the week, see our comprehensive TV guide
Saturday
Viewing guide, by Ben Dowell
Eurovision Song Contest Grand Final 2025
BBC1, 8pm
Yes, it’s that time of year again, when Graham Norton leads the nation in a marathon of kitsch, variable music making and, by my estimation at least, another weak British entry. Still, good luck to our female trio Remember Monday, who will perform their song What the Hell Just Happened? in tonight’s show live from Basel, Switzerland. Who knows, an excellent performance (and impressive staging) can count for much. But you will need a lot of energy to catch all 26 acts, and drinking games are not an unknown strategy to help last the course. Eurovision trivia also helps. Did you know that last year’s victors, Switzerland, last won in 1988 with Céline Dion? Well, you do now.
• How to watch Eurovision 2025: channels, dates and timings
Doctor Who
BBC1, 7.10pm
“Welcome to the 803rd Interstellar Song Contest,” says the familiar, teethtastic face of Rylan, albeit in the unfamiliar setting of a space station. After last week’s slightly enervating Lagos-set adventure comes one where the jeopardy and whizz-bang special effects are set to 11, and there’s also the appearance (as himself) from Graham Norton. Still, as the showrunner Russell T Davies has forewarned, if the FA Cup final runs into extra time or penalties then his show will be squeezed from the linear schedule (though it will be on iPlayer). The real Eurovision Song Contest is on at 8pm, and that show moves for no man. Or Time Lord.
• Inside the eccentric world of Doctor Who, from 1963 to today
Live FA Cup Final
BBC1/ITV1, from 3pm
With kick-off at 4.30pm, neither of our main terrestrial channels are doing too much build-up (I still fondly remember those whole-day marathons of yesteryear) for the clash between Crystal Palace and Manchester City. Gary Lineker is on BBC detail, with Mark Pougatch heading up ITV1’s coverage. City, who have underperformed this season, will be hoping to make up for losing to Manchester Utd at last year’s cup final, while Palace’s two previous finals have twice ended in defeat, both times to United.
Titanic: Our Secret Histories
Channel 4, 8pm
Ahead of the 40th anniversary of the discovery of the Titanic’s wreckage on September 1, 1985, this tells the often disturbing and terrifying stories of some of the passengers and crew who survived and perished in the 1912 disaster. Hearing from their living descendants, this film is keen to illuminate the multiracial impact of the disaster, which affected families from Sweden and China to Haiti and Lebanon but who have, this suggests, been airbrushed from the history books.
• Could Titanic have survived? Digital scans show how close it came
Streaming choice, by Victoria Segal
This City Is Ours
BBC iPlayer
Fans of Kin, Gangs of London and Peaky Blinders will enjoy navigating the betrayals and duplicity of this crime drama from Stephen Butchard (Shardlake, The Last Kingdom). Set in Liverpool, it focuses on the Phelan crime family, led by Sean Bean’s Sheffield transplant Ronnie and his wife Elaine ( Julie Graham). Their trusted consigliere is Michael (James Nelson-Joyce), a man trying to start a family in between organising drug shipments and trying to find a traitor. There is plenty of nefarious activity and sudden violence, but the show is smart enough to know the real tension lies in a family christening. A second season has been confirmed.
Film choice, by Kevin Maher
The Boys in the Boat (12, 2023)
BBC2, 8pm
The Boys in the Boat is the latest film to mine the rich underdog seam of Olympic strata. It comes with a Hollywood sheen. George Clooney directs, Tom Hanks produces and Hitler is vanquished. It’s the tale of a poverty-stricken working class rowing team from the University of Washington who defied the odds to represent the USA at the 1936 Olympics in Berlin. The lead rower Joe Rantz is played by Callum Turner, the Londoner who was Theseus Scamander in the Fantastic Beasts films, with memorable hair dye, a pleasing hint of Sterling Hayden. Jesse Owens (Jyuddah Jaymes) is given a nugatory cameo. (124min)
The Untouchables (15, 1987)
BBC2, 10pm
Brian De Palma shows his customary flair with this stylish, fictionalised account of a feud between the mobster Al Capone (a scenery-chewing Robert De Niro) and the lawman Eliot Ness (Kevin Costner). Due to the corruption that eats away the very heart of the law enforcement agencies of the 1920s, Ness carefully hand-picks an elite team of clean cops to help bring the notorious gangster to justice. Sean Connery won an Oscar for playing the veteran Irish cop who forms an integral part of the Ness squad. (119min) Wendy Ide
• The best films of 2025 so far, as chosen by our critics
Radio choice, by Clair Woodward
Eurovision Song Contest
Radio 2, from 6am
Leading up to the grand final, which is presented by Rylan and Scott Mills live from Basel at 8pm, the station devotes the day to Euro programming, starting with Sounds of the 60s with Tony Blackburn, in which he’ll play every UK entry from the decade. From 5pm, Michelle Visage hosts a countdown to reveal Your Ultimate 21st Century Eurovision Song, compiled from the votes of Radio 2 listeners from a playlist of all the winners, runners up and favourites from 2000-2024. What will be No 1? There’s also postmatch analysis in Richie Anderson’s Eurovision After Party (11.30pm).
Sunday
Viewing guide, by Victoria Segal
The Bombing of Pan Am 103
BBC1, 9pm
There are, inevitably, many horrific moments in this factual drama about the Lockerbie bombing: the sudden earthquake-like shudder of glasses in a pub; flaming wreckage falling from the sky; a police car’s headlights picking out suitcases strewn across a country road. Yet the most chilling shot comes near the beginning, cameras simply showing the passengers walking down the tunnel to their plane, boarding the flight that was supposed to take them from Heathrow to New York. Based on extensive research with the victims’ families, investigators and the Lockerbie community, this drama recreates the terrible events of December 21, 1988, before showing how the Scottish police and the FBI united to discover the truth behind the bombing and pursue some kind of justice for the 270 victims. Connor Swindells, Peter Mullan and Eddie Marsan star, each bringing the gravitas needed for such heavy witness-bearing.
• Why bereaved families of Lockerbie bombing still seek the truth
Code of Silence
ITV1, 9pm
Finding a new angle of entry for a police drama is not easy, so all credit to Catherine Moulton, the writer of this six-part thriller, for creating such a stylish set-up. Alison (Rose Ayling-Ellis) is a deaf canteen worker at Canterbury police station, alleviating the boredom by lip-reading the adulterous officers. Her desire for excitement seems to be fulfilled when detectives ask her to help by lip-reading surveillance footage of a criminal gang, but it’s not long before she’s facing real danger. Ayling-Ellis is engaging as the restless Alison, yet the performances of the charismatic cast — including Charlotte Ritchie as DS Ashleigh Francis and Fifi Garfield as Alison’s mother — are intensified by the striking sound design and clever use of subtitles to open another portal into Alison’s increasingly treacherous world.
Scandinavia with Simon Reeve
BBC2, 9pm
Simon Reeve is visiting five countries in Scandinavia, a region that suits his blend of thrilling adventure and exploration of serious issues to a tee. He begins in the Arctic archipelago Svalbard for a spot of whale watching, a visit to a mine and a lesson in the global tensions that exist in this stunning part of the world. He also travels to Finland, location of Nato’s longest border with Russia, and discovers that even in magical, snowy Lapland there’s a nuclear bunker under Santa’s village. Joe Clay
Long Bright River
Channel 4, 10pm/11pm
Based on a 2020 novel by Liz Moore, Long Bright River is a gritty eight-part crime drama set in the Kensington district of Philadelphia. Now gentrified, it was once the go-to place for heroin. Amanda Seyfried plays Mickey Fitzpatrick, a veteran patrolwoman who is looking for her missing junkie sister, Kacey (Ashleigh Cummings). Mickey fears that her sister could be the latest victim of a multiple killer in a drama that owes a considerable debt to Mare of Easttown, but is not at the same level. JC
Streaming choice, by Andrew Male
Matlock
Sky/Now
As fans will know, this is so much more than a simple reboot of the 1980s legal drama. Kathy Bates is in the titular role as a folksy defence attorney with a brilliant analytical mind. If you’ve still not caught up with it, we won’t give away episode one’s bravura twist, but even after that bombshell this courtroom procedural continues to surprise. That’s chiefly down to Bates’s wily, mercurial performance but also the delightful David Del Rio and Leah Lewis as junior lawyers Billy and Sarah and a surprisingly dark subtext that constantly lurks beneath that glossy network sheen.
Film choice, by Kevin Maher
Everest (12, 2015)
ITV4, 9.45pm
This is not a subtle film. The director Baltasar Kormakur accentuates every hint of peril with a musical punctuation mark. “Be back for the birth, Rob Hall,” says Keira Knightley, playing the pregnant wife of the climber who is leading a group of wealthy mountaineers up Everest. Yeah, good luck with that, says the score in plaintive strings. However, once this 3D spectacular straps on crampons and hits its stride, it is unrelentingly exciting stuff. A high-quality ensemble cast is headed by Jason Clarke as Hall, with Jake Gyllenhaal as the rival expedition leader Scott Fischer. (121min) Wendy Ide
Yesterday (12, 2019)
BBC2, 10.45pm
Himesh Patel is Jack Malik, a struggling busker from Suffolk who, after a brief global power cut, emerges into a world where the Beatles never existed. But Jack can remember the tunes and sing them with haunting clarity. He records a smattering of them, becomes famous and is tempted over to LA. All along, the riddle of Malik’s new world deepens. What can it all mean? The answer to these questions arrives halfway in, and things focus instead on the ersatz romance between Malik and his best buddy, Ellie (Lily James). (113min)
• The best films to watch at home this week
Radio choice, by Clair Woodward
Sunday Feature
Radio 3, 7.15pm
In Queer Gothic the novelist Sarah Waters examines the queer roots of gothic literature and architecture in the 18th and early 19th century as she tours Horace Walpole’s eccentric Strawberry Hill House in Twickenham, which became a place where Walpole’s queer community was memorialised. Walpole’s 1764 The Castle of Otranto is regarded as the first gothic novel, and Waters and a series of experts discover that the camp, transgressive attitude of the gothic immediately echoed with the queer community. Waters discusses works touched by the genre, including the diaries of the lesbian Anne Lister, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and the iconic 1931 film of the book made by the gay director James Whale.
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