Tabla de contenidos para 2-8th August 2025 en Radio Times

A FEW DAYS ago I searched online for a programme about a pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela. I was a bit surprised when Shaun of the Dead appeared as a suggestion. Maybe even zombies have hidden yearnings for spiritual awakening. I blame the algorithm. However, this is an example of how control has moved away from us under the guise of increasing our choice. When the streaming companies decide what we should be watching – however odd – then what chance does any concept of public service broadcasting (PSB) have? Because PSB doesn’t aim for just popularity or amusement, but for Lord Reith’s formative values for the BBC: to inform, educate and entertain. The next day, I attended the launch of a report in Parliament. Led by research at the…

TENNIS Cincinnati Open From Thursday 4pm Sky Sports Tennis/Now Defending champion Jannik Sinner (above) will be fixed on claiming a fifth grand slam title at the US Open later this month, having reached all three slam finals in 2025 and winning in Australia and at Wimbledon. This ATP 1000 hard-court event should give us a steer on whether he is primed for another. In the WTA 1000 event, 2024 champion Aryna Sabalenka is expected is expected to return to the tour after skipping the Canadian Open with fatigue. SNOOKER Saudi Arabia Snooker Masters Friday 12 noon, 6pm TNT Sports 3/Discovery+ The first regular-format ranking tournament of the season kicks off in Jeddah as Judd Trump (above) defends his title. The world number one defeated Mark Williams with a stunning comeback in the…

ART Fake or Fortune? 9.00pm BBC1 Catch up via iPlayer Art blogger Robjn Cantus bought a lot containing two paintings for £35 at an online auction, believing that they were both the work of 20th-century artist Vera Cunningham. But Cantus was then informed that one of the pieces could be by New Zealand artist Frances Hodgkins — although the piece doesn’t have a signature and, intriguingly, has a whole other painting on the reverse side. However, Hodgkins had a “very fluid style” of painting, which means it’s difficult to authenticate her work without signature or provenance. Cantus is initially not that fond of the piece — but would like to know who painted it, especially as it could be worth £40,000–50,000 if it does turn out to be by Hodgkins. Fiona Bruce…

DOCUMENTARY Saving Lives at Sea 8.00pm (8.30pm in Wales) BBC2 Catch up via iPlayer There’s a nice surprise in tonight’s episode. Mostly, it involves the kind of coastal jeopardy we’ve become familiar with on this show — maybe a little too familiar with, after ten series… A boy on a paddleboard is swept out to sea when the wind gets up. A yacht runs aground on a sandbank. Two men looking for shrimps are cut off by the rising tide. The stranded yacht is high drama: getting the casualties off in a rolling swell takes some doing. But the surprise comes in a sequence far from the high seas, in…Teddington. Yes, the leafy London suburb has a lifeboat station, the furthest inland of any RNLI base, dealing with a hundred or so…

CONVERSATION Dig It Producers Persephonica have already turned the friends chatting format into a hit podcast with childhood mates Lily Allen and Miquita Oliver (Miss Me?) and, judging by the first episode of Dig It, it looks like they’ve done it again with Jo Whiley and Zoe Ball, who have been pals since the 1990s. Naturally, Zoe was invited to Jo’s recent 60th birthday party, which gets the conversation going and launches them into ageing, fashion, family pets and pet family names (Zoe’s son calls her “Mum ‘n’ Bass”). Love it. FIONA HUGHES DOCUMENTARY Shadow World: the Grave Robbers The phrase “safe as houses” is rocked to its foundations here by investigative journalist Sue Mitchell (To Catch a Scorpion). She exposes the crime gangs who used the publicly available “Bona…

PRIZE CROSSWORD One winner will receive a free six-month subscription to Radio Times (£132.50 basic annual rate), plus an exclusive Radio Times leather cover. Already a subscriber? You are still eligible — an extra six months will be added to your current subscription. For more information on subscriptions go to buysubscriptions.com/radiotimes. To enter, fill in and post the coupon below, or email your answers to xword32@radiotimescomps.co.uk WORDFINDER Find the name of the show in the shaded squares to win the prize below. EASY CLUES Just for fun! PRIZE CROSSWORD ACROSS 7 Aurally note, taking some time? (2,3) 8 By an extended flank (9) 9 Let out holy books in stalk (6) 11 Circular man sounded injured? (8) 12 Stuff to be in tests again as actor with cold feet? (5,7)…

1 STREAMING Wednesday Season 2, part 1 available Wednesday Netflix The creepy, kooky, mysterious and spooky Addams family return, as morbid daughter Wednesday (the brilliantly deadpan Jenna Ortega, centre above) sets out to solve another mystery. Catherine Zeta-Jones (second from left, above) is also back as Morticia, with Joanna Lumley as Morticia’s mother, Hester, added to the mix. INTERVIEWS P12 ▶ 2 TV Parenthood Sunday 7.20pm BBC1 A dazzling new natural history series that shows the lengths animals go to to ensure the survival of their offspring. Watch out for a burrowing owl (above), hippos and the African social spider… FEATURE P18 ▶ 3 TV The Count of Monte Cristo Saturday 9.00pm U&Drama Sam Claflin stars as the mightily wronged Edmond Dantè, a sailor accused of treason, in a fresh…

Since finding fame in Pirates of the Caribbean, The Hunger Games and Snow White and the Huntsman, Sam Claflin has gone on to play television roles as diverse as Oswald Mosley in Peaky Blinders and Billy Dunne, lead singer of a fictional 1970s rock band in Daisy Jones & the Six. Now the 39-year-old from Norwich stars as wrongly imprisoned Edmond Dantès in The Count of Monte Cristo, a new eight-part French-Italian adaptation of the classic Alexandre Dumas novel about betrayal and revenge. There are more than 50 screen versions of The Count of Monte Cristo. Why do people keep returning to this story? It has many life lessons, number one being that forgiveness is key. Learn to live in love, rather than hate. Edmond is an anti-hero – he’s…

Wednesday Series 2 part 1 available from Wednesday Netflix JENNA ORTEGA plays Wednesday Addams ‘It’s such a gift to revisit a character that’s so meaningful to so many people’ JENNA ORTEGA REMEMBERS exactly how she felt before the first-season launch of Wednesday, director/producer Tim Burton’s Addams Family reboot for Netflix, in which she plays the titular Wednesday, a brilliant but dour world-weary teen with psychic powers, the gloomiest of outlooks, a font of acid putdowns and a near-homicidal misanthropy. Woe is she. “I was scared s***less,” she says, plainly. “I didn’t know what I was doing, I met Tim once before starting to create the character. There was just an obscene amount of pressure and worry and I wasn’t sleeping… We didn’t even know that people were going to watch it.” It…

NATURE Parenthood 7.20pm BBC1 Full series available via iPlayer NEW SERIES You may not be familiar with the boxer crabs of Indonesia, the burrowing owls of Arizona or the social spiders of Namibia, but, after watching this, you’ll have a job forgetting them. Each is stunning in its way but also a bit mad — in other words, ideal for a quirky slideshow on animals raising their young. I would argue spoilers are an issue with this kind of programme, so I won’t reveal what exactly the spiders get up to, but it’s deliciously nightmarish. In fact, that whole sequence feels like a choreographed Tim Burton film. By contrast, those crabs, with their pretty orange patterning and “gloves”, which are in fact anemones they hold in their claws like pompoms, could be…

CRAFT The Repair Shop 8.00pm BBC1 Catch up via iPlayer With so much misery going on in the world it’s no wonder that this wholesome series attracts so many viewers. It doesn’t matter what objects are brought in for restoration nor what emotional memory they hold, we lap it up. Tonight’s new episode features the usual eclectic mix of treasures: there’s a concrete portrait of a beekeeper, a precious silver statuette of a paratrooper that barely survived a shipwreck and an Iranian leather baby hammock. Meanwhile Dom Chinea works on a flight case that was originally owned by the late Trevor Bolder, Uriah Heep’s bassist. It’s now been passed to another Hull musician who hopes to take it to Glastonbury. JANE RACKHAM SOAP EastEnders 7.30pm BBC1 Catch up via iPlayer There’s a weaving together of…

GARDENING Gardeners’ World 8.00pm BBC2 Catch up via Player Can thoughts be turning to winter already? Ever planning ahead, Monty Don will be doing just that tonight as he focuses on his veg garden and the produce that will sustain him in the cold, dark months. In addition, he’s sowing some hardy annuals for cutting next year, while his trained fruit comes in for some summer pruning. Then there’s his wildlife garden, which is the subject of “a difficult decision”. Elsewhere, it’s four years since the official opening of RHS Garden Bridgewater in Salford, and Jamie Butterworth pays a visit to discover how it’s been developing. One definite bonus is the RHS’s recent decision to continue the scheme that gives Salford residents free entry on Tuesdays. Heading south, Rekha Mistry’s Peak District garden proves…

Mocking up 10 Downing Street was a crucial element to get right in the new Netflix thriller Hostage, in which Suranne Jones plays embattled Prime Minister Abigail Dalton. When her husband is thrown into mortal peril abroad, Dalton has to cope with personal dramas as well as a Cabinet that is ranged against her, while at the same time keeping a doubtful nation on side with regular press appeals from the Downing Street podium, a perfect replica of which was recreated for filming. “That was thrilling to do,” says Jones, who also executive produced the five-part series. “We built the outside of Downing Street so that we could have that interaction. It was just great, being outside No 10 with all the press attention, coming in and going out, recognisable moments…

Parenthood Sunday 7.20pm BBC1 BABIES ARE OFTEN the stars of natural history programmes, leaving their parents as bystanders. But the mums and dads of the animal kingdom finally have their moment in the spotlight in a new BBC series. Looking at how different creatures, from insects to big cats and great apes, nurture their young – or, in some cases, don’t – and the brutal sacrifices they have to make, Parenthood casts an eye over family units across land and sea in 23 countries. “The world is changing incredibly fast and it’s making a parent’s job increasingly challenging, both for humans and animals, who have so many different ways of doing it,” says the series executive producer Keith Scholey. Fittingly, his own son Olly, who’s also an experienced wildlife film-maker, produced…

DRAMA The Count of Monte Cristo 9.00pm U&Drama Full series on U NEW SERIES After dozens of screen versions of Alexandre Dumas’s classic epic of revenge and redemption, it may be too much to expect this eight-part adaptation to add anything new. But while it takes few risks, this series directed by Bille August (Pelle the Conqueror) also demonstrates that some stories simply don’t need tampering with to compel. Sam Claflin plays Edmond Dantès, the upstanding sailor falling prey to the machinations of Blake Ritson’s Danglars (who covets his job) and Harry Taurasi’s Fernand (who craves his fiancée) when a letter he has been asked to transport to Paris by his late, respected former captain is revealed to the authorities. With the Bourbon Restoration still fragile, anything with the whiff of Bonapartism…

REALITY The Fortune Hotel 9.00pm ITV1 Catch up via ITVX Of all the “It’s a bit like The Traitors, but…” competitive reality shows that have sprung up in recent years, this is one of the more enjoyable. Stephen Mangan (looking as though he’s having a lovely time; hardly unsurprising given that he’s wafting around Granada in pressed linen) is back to welcome a new set of guests to The Fortune Hotel. If you know what “the first case swap at the nightcap in the Lady Luck Bar” means, you likely partook of last year’s debut series. For the uninitiated, pairs are allocated a silver briefcase at random. Most contain nothing, but inside one is the dreaded “early checkout card” (rendering them out of the competition) and in another is £250,000. Who can…

BBC Proms Friday 9.00pm Radio 3 LIKE MOST LANDLUBBERS, Simon Armitage – born far from the coast in West Yorkshire – has never deliberately tuned in to the Shipping Forecast, yet it exerts a strange power over him. “I find the Shipping Forecast peaceful and I can’t quite tell you why,” says the poet laureate. “People at sea rely on it for navigation, but I don’t think of it as a functional thing; for me it’s everyday poetry.” There is an undoubted enchantment in the forecast’s evocation of 31 names: the hypnotic lilt of Hebrides, Fisher and German Bight. Is it a little perplexing to be out-poeticised by a weather report? “No, it’s not. I’m sure the Shipping Forecast developed organically. Nobody imagined it would become this lullaby mantra.” That mantra,…

I’VE NEVER WANTED to kill my wife,” states author Peter Swanson. Which is a relief, given his latest novel is all about marital murder. Untimely death is never far away in Swanson’s work – the 57-year-old has written 11 previous domestic thrillers blood-splashed with psychological suspense – but his new one, Kill Your Darlings, is a little closer to home. The book traces the breakdown of Thom and Wendy’s seemingly ideal 25-year marriage backwards through pivotal moments until a decades-old secret is laid bare. No spoilers here (it’s revealed in the novel’s first line): Wendy is desperate to do away with her husband. “It’s a very dark book about marriage,” affirms the Massachusetts-based writer. “And there are details that made my wife say, ‘Is there some reality to this situation?’…