Table of contents for 18-24th April 2026 in Radio Times

Paul Cziok is a 30-year veteran of the industry and has worked as an archive researcher and producer on numerous programmes including this week’s C5 documentary Philip and the Queen: a Royal Fairytale as well as the BBC film Secrets of the Conclave. A DREAM CAREER I did my degree in fine art and originally planned to be a painter until I came across a book called Careers in Television, which had a section about news and archive libraries. Through a friend at This Morning, I got some work experience in the film research department, and eventually a full-time job opened up. THE REEL DEAL Every bit of footage you see in a programme that hasn’t been filmed by the production team has probably been sourced by somebody like me.…

World Snooker Championship From Saturday BBC One, BBC Two, BBC Four, TNT Sports ‘The competition is made doubly vivid and trebly powerful by the extraordinary nature of the space it takes place in’ I ALMOST DIDN’T go. With Steve Davis leading 12–4 overnight, Jimmy White surely had no chance on the second day of the final of the World Snooker Championship. But my editor told me to go anyway, and as White made his blistering comeback I could have reached out and jogged his elbow. I was at the Crucible Theatre in Sheffield, perhaps the most intense venue in all sport – and I’ve been to a good few in my time. On that unforgettable Monday in May 1984, I watched in wonder as White reeled off seven of the first…

DOCUMENTARY Queen Elizabeth Il: Her Story, Our Century  9.00pm BBC One Catch up via iPlayer Notall royal programmes are born equal. Some, like this documentary about the late Queen to mark what would have been her 100th birthday, get a head start in life. The BBC team had access to terrific footage and photos from the Royal Archives. As a result, there are times where it feels as if we have stepped through a portal into the Windsors’ garden, as the young princesses play on palace lawns in the 1930s, or Lilibet - before she knew she would ever be Queen - sits on her father’s lap in hysterics and he beams with laughter. Clearly, countless programmes have followed the contours of this particular life, but the account here manages…

Euphoria 10.15pm Sky Atlantic More chaos guaranteed in the lives of Cassie (Sydney Sweeney, above) and co in the award-winning drama. Sun, Sea and Selling Houses 6.00pm C4 The British estate agents in Spain return. This firstepisode features a sprawling country estate in Almeria, and the hunt for a low-budget home in the Costa Blanca. The Murder Line 1.00pm (Tue 3.50am STV) ITV1 In the Canadian thriller, Henry (Stephen Amell) must go along with his pal’s dodgy scheme if he wants to protect his family.…

REALITY The Neighbourhood  9.00pm ITV1Catchup via ITVX NEW SERIES The televisual trend for befriending people then stabbing "them inthe backfor money continues in this elaborate new entertainment format, launching with huge fanfare and an A-list host in Graham Norton. Six households move into a fake street ina fake village, where they will live alongside each other as neighbours - and rivals. The groups must compete against each other in a series oftasks and challenges with the ultimate goal of winning a cash prize of £250,000. They'll also be socialising and forming friendships, which are sure to be tested as the weeks go on, as will the dynamics within each household asfriends and family members clash over strategy. It’s the neighbours’ chat group come to life, with.a smattering of a softer,…

MORE ON DISCS David Apong finds Desert Island Discs guests’ choice of music depressing. I don’t mind what tracks they choose; that is personal preference. What irritates me, however, is some guests’ choice of luxury. Si King (29 March Radio 4) chose a fridge, and Lauren Laverne even offered to fill it! Roy Plomley definitely wouldn’t have approved. What happened to the old rule of no luxury to aid the islanders’ survival? Caroline Bedford Leeds …It is depressing that David Apong finds it depressing that guests on Desert Island Discs often choose 20th- or 21st-century pop music. It could be so much worse: they might choose music that was “pop” in the 1850s! I believe it is called “classical” now, and was churned out by musicians kept by the rich…

What’s the view from your sofa? My husband [Scottish film-maker Jonathan “Jono” McLeod] and I just moved, and when you sit on the sofa, there’s a door and the rest is telly. It’s massive. Nothing else really goes on in that room. We had one of those projector things before. I’m not very technical, but my husband is, so he decided the big telly was good enough that we could get rid of it. What have you enjoyed watching recently? I’m really enjoying Saturday Night Live UK. Everyone’s saying that in a kind of mildly surprised tone of voice, because we were all geared up for it to be absolutely pants, and it’s not. I just finished Pluribus, so hopefully there will be a second season of that. If there…

Netflix’s Stranger Things may have ended only recently, but it’s already back in an animated spin-off, Tales from ’85, which swaps the horror of Hawkins with a more family-friendly feel. “We wanted to focus on kids being kids, riding bikes, solving mysteries with their walkie-talkies and flashlights,” says showrunner Eric Robles, though he notes the series still promises plenty of monsters and mysteries. The team behind the animated show, which is set between seasons 2 and 3 of Stranger Things, wanted to honour the original by using the show’s posters as the basis for the animation style. “We have a very stylised look to our show,” Robles says. “We brought this very illustrative feel.” The animation allows for more freedom compared to liveaction. “We can really crank up the kinds…

How did you get involved in Half Man? Baby Reindeer had just hit, so when this arrived on my doorstep my interest was piqued because Richard had this genuinely unique, fresh voice – it was television that you hadn’t really seen or felt before. I only read episode six, an incredibly heightened spiral, but his writing balanced intensely dark subjects with a sense of humour that is especially Scottish. That levity helped us through. Richard wrote Niall with me in mind, which was flattering, and we had a lovely conversation about the show’s themes and our personal experiences with them. Could you talk about that? I have a painful amount of self-loathing. I can’t watch anything I do and I’ve been that way for 10 years. It’s the act of…

Chernobyl: Inside the Meltdown Sun, Mon 9pm, 10pm National Geographic FOR DECADES, SERGEI BELYAKOV had the same recurring nightmare. He was inside the Chernobyl Power Plant in Ukraine, soon after the explosion on 26 April 1986 that created the worst nuclear disaster in history. “I turned down a short corridor which seemed to be yellow everywhere – the floor, the walls, the windowsills,” he says. “Suddenly I realised the yellow colour was thousands of butterflies, all dead.” Yet this haunting vision was not the conjuring of dark imagination but a sight he saw with his own eyes, little more than three months after Reactor Four at Chernobyl blew apart. Belyakov, then a 30-year-old university chemistry lecturer in Dnipropetrovsk, 390 miles south-east of the nuclear plant, was one of the thousands of…

PROPERTY Interior Design Masters with Alan Carr 8.00pm BBC One Catch up via iPlayer “Modern contemporary”, “modern romantic”, “contemporary Victorian”, “botanic maximalist” and “nostalgic adventure” is how some of the 10 novice designers describe their style. While you might wonder what on earth that means, you can be sure that their revamped Dorset beach huts are going to lookvery different from each other. Some are very quirky indeed. One is decked out in animal prints, while another features a lot of upcycled and papier-maché items. Well, nothing says “seaside” more than a zebra stripe and a homemade lampshade, does it? The genial Alan Carrflits between contestants, making jokes as well as offering them encouragement - and even cockles - as they and their two-man DIY team wrestle with MDF, paint…

REALITY Race across the World  8.00pm BBC One Catch up via iPlayer As the race leaders leave southern Turkey bound for the next check point in Tbilisi, Georgia, the remaining three other teams are snapping at their heels. Of course, we know from previous series that it only takes one unlucky decision to fall behind or an inadvertently clever strategy to forge ahead. One pair are delayed because one of them feels poorly, while several get stuck in towns with poortransport links. Inevitably, there will betension when they're stranded at yet another remote bus station hearing that nothing is going anywhere until the next day. At this stage of thecompetition, weoften hear more about the racers’ personal lives because they're now comfortable enough in front of the cameras to share…

LAST YEAR, THE UK’s watercooler market was valued at nearly £192 million, with around 780,000 machines in operation across the country. That’s a lot of watercoolers, which obviously require watercooler moments. Luckily, the UK has no shortage of those, either. Last year, our well-hydrated nation had a range of enthralling audio to discuss, from joyous sporting celebrations and royal revelations to sobering reflections and political confrontations. But which was your Radio Times Moment of the Year? Choose your favourite from our shortlist and cast your vote. The winner will be announced at the Audio Academy’s Aria Awards on 21 May. 1 Sarah speaks: the Southport attacks BBC Radio Merseyside As odd as it sounds, hearing the testimony of Sarah, a survivor of the mass stabbing at a Southport dance class…

ALL OVER THE country, thousands of lilacs – stalwarts of the classic cottage garden – will soon be bursting into flower. They fill our gardens with blossom and delicious scent for just a few weeks, then it’s all over for another year. I love a plant that is so wondrous and magical it doesn’t matter how fleeting it is. There’s a nostalgia to them, too: they remind me of grandparents, my childhood and simpler times – not a bad thing in this crazy world! The common lilac, Syringa vulgaris, is native to the Balkan peninsula. It’s tough, easy to grow and copes well with extreme temperatures – so perhaps a good climate-change plant. Lilacs thrive in most soils (just not too acidic), and pollution doesn’t bother them, so they work…

PRIZE CROSSWORD ACROSS 7 Topping, say, triumph on a regular basis (5) 8 Mock enjoyment in Topeka again (4,3,2) 9 In a jam, hearing small firm plaster (6) 11 Adjust, for example, love for other self (5,3) 12 Make egg clearer, OK, for his spaces on TV? (6,6) 15 Recline, grabbing honey drink and fizzy drink (7) 16 Sparing your ancient split inside (7) 18 Position joker on estate car (7,5) 20 Establish law‑breaking within stable (8) 22 Queen is returning pigment (6) 23 Emery cloth with A going, for I get bird? (9) 24 It beats edible pod (5) DOWN 1 Fake tithe breaks in unison (9) 2 Find cheaper way to turn soccer around (3,7) 3 Charlie joins mystic prophet with small boat (7) 4 US comedy’s night…

Born in Salford in 1964, Christopher Eccleston made his name in dramas like Cracker and Our Friends in the North. His films range from Shallow Grave to GI Joe, with recent TV jobs including HBO’s The Leftovers and Peter Bowker’s The A-Word. Most famously he played the ninth Doctor in Doctor Who, which he doesn’t discuss outside conventions – his “no Blue Box” rule. Next up is his role as a cult leader in the new Netflix drama Unchosen. What was the appeal of playing a cult leader? What attracted me to Mr Phillips was Unchosen’s writer, Julia Geary. There’s a great trend in drama at the moment for antagonists who are toxic, white, apparently heterosexual, late-middleaged men. Thankfully, Julia gave him dimension and placed him in a story of…

MasterChef Tuesday–Thursday 9.00pm BBC One ‘I don’t feel I’m “picking up” after anybody’GRACE DENT HERE THEY ALL are, trooping into Day One of this year’s contest with shining, enthusiastic faces. There’s the woman who wants to show her expertise at cooking steak and chips; the man who only ate an egg for the first time in his 20s; the chap who has spent years dreaming of wearing a MasterChef apron. Watching at home, we’ll come to know and root for the new tranche of amateur chefs being put through their paces on the legendary cooking show. But they’re not the only fresh faces this time – there are new judges, too. Restaurant critic Grace Dent and chef Anna Haugh have both had stints as judges on the celebrity and professional…

1 STREAMING Half Man  Friday from 6.00am BBC iPlayer How do you follow a discomfiting drama like Baby Reindeer? If you’re Richard Gadd, you create an even more dysfunctional relationship than stalker-victim and chart its damaged anatomy with a pathologist’s diligence. And so Half Man focuses on the toxic codependency between de facto stepbrothers Ruben (Gadd, above right) and Niall (Jamie Bell). There will be blood. SEE FEATURE P12 2 TELEVISION Mint Monday 9.00pm, 9.30pm BBC One The first TV series from film-maker Charlotte Regan stars Lindsay Duncan and is a Romeo and Juliet-esque tale set in the criminal underworld of central Scotland and in the shadow of the area’s oil refinery and petrochemical plant. It’s also much better than it sounds. SEE FEATURE P22 3 TELEVISION Queen Elizabeth II:…

DRAMA The Murder Line 10.00pm,11.10pm ITV1 Full series available on ITVX NEW SERIES Oscar-nominated Minnie Driver seems to beentering her TV thriller era. Having starred in Harlan Coben’s Run Away, the Transatlantic talent now steals scenes in this gripping Canadian crime drama. Going by the name of The Borderline across the Atlantic - the title refers to the 5,525-mile boundary between the US and Canada, nown as the world’s longest undefended Border - it follows Ontario cop Henry “Hank” Roland (Stephen Amell), who goes above and beyond the call of duty to protect his best friend, smuggler Tommy Hawley (Hamza Haq), from a British crime syndicate. Driver plays May Ferguson, the powerdressed matriarch ofa violent clan of drug barons, who is determined to track down Tommy and her missing cocaine…

DRAMA Mint 9.00pm, 9.30pm BBC One Fullseries available on iPlayer NEW SERIES While it’s never a good sign when gangsters pop up in EastEnders, audiences welcome them almost everywhere else. From The Sopranos to Peaky Blinders, our appetite for tales of the criminal underworld is well-fed but remains ravenous. Crime family sagas area flavour, not just of the moment, but of the times. And soto Mint, Charlotte Regan’s transplant of Romeo and Juliet to central Scotland. As befits a writer-director who made her feature film Scrapper (available on iPlayer) because “growing up, all | saw was films where everyone working class was depressed and | wanted to make something withthem happy”, Mintis an offbeat, leftfield look ata crime family’s dynamics through three generations of women. The Juliet of proceedings is…

ARTS Making a Maestro 8.00pm Sky Arts Catch up via Now NEW SERIES What does an orchestral conductor do? This series explores one of the intangible mysteries in music - how the person waving the baton shapes the sound we hear. Yes, they set the tempo and phrasing and so on, but what else do they bring to the podium, and how? What makes someone great, or not-quite-so-great? To find out, we eavesdrop ona competition for up-and-coming young conductors from across Europe. Twenty of them arrive in London (the series was filmed last December) to competefor the chance of a one-year junior post at the LSO (London Symphony Orchestra). And it’s brutal: in the first round they have just 15 minutes to impress the judges. It’s a bit like Masterchef-MasterClef,…

Great Japanese Railway Journeys Monday–Friday 6.30pm BBC Two So, Michael, you went to Japan and they buried you? Up to my neck in black sand, yes. Hot springs are a big thing out there because of all the volcanic activity, and I went to one on Kyushu, the southernmost of Japan’s four main islands, where the subterranean waters heat the sand, and they bury you in it. It’s supposed to be good for all sorts of bits for you – people swear by it for the circulation, digestion and so on. It’s really no odder than going to a sauna. Except in a sauna you’re not buried. What if they forget to exhume you? It’s doubtful you could get yourself out, but there are people on hand to help. They stuck…