Countdown to RHS Chelsea Flower Show 2025
Sunday, BBC One, 6.30pm
The Chelsea Flower Show is Britain’s big annual horticultural extravaganza, but of course it’s only a warm-up for the best flower show of them all: Bloom in the Phoenix Park. Still, it’s brave of the good people at the Royal Horticultural Society to keep trying to out-blossom Bloom. In advance of Monday’s opening, Sophie Raworth and Adam Frost get a sneak peek at what punters can expect from this year’s show, and we are promised an exclusive look at Monty Don’s Dog Garden, his first-ever garden creation for the flower show. This will be a pooch-friendly place, planted with daisies, dandelions and clover to make the soil hardier under-paw, and other smart additions to make it a real hound haven. Throughout the week the Beeb will be bringing you all the horticultural action from the Chelsea Flower Show, at 2pm and 8pm, Monday-Thursday, and 2pm, 7.30pm and 8pm on Friday.
The Bombing of Pan AM 103
Sunday, BBC One, 9pm
Earlier this year Sky Atlantic aired the true-life drama Lockerbie: A Search for Truth, starring Colin Firth as a father on a quest for justice for his daughter and other victims of the Lockerbie bombing. This true-life drama series focuses on the flawed response of authorities to the atrocity, which killed 270 people from 21 different countries, and how families only learned their loved ones had been killed via news reports. The resulting outcry led to authorities ensuring that names of victims were never to be revealed until their immediate families were informed, a practice that was followed following 9/11. The series also explores the devastating effect of the bombing on the local community and how people in and around the Scottish town came together in the aftermath of the bombing, volunteering to feed emergency crews and laundering victims’ clothes to return them to their families. Connor Swindells, Merritt Wever, Peter Mullan and Eddie Marsan are among the large ensemble cast re-enacting this dark event in modern history.
Code of Silence
Sunday, UTV, 9pm
Rose Ayling-Ellis stars in this compelling crime thriller featuring cast members from the deaf, disabled and neurodivergent communities. Ayling-Ellis plays deaf woman Alison Brooks, who works in a police canteen and can follow any conversation simply by lip-reading. Detectives Ashleigh Francis (Charlotte Richie) and James Marsh (Andrew Buchan) notice Alison’s prodigious lip-reading skills, and recruit her to help them take down a ruthless crime gang who are plotting a spectacular heist. They have the gang members under surveillance, but need Alison to decipher what they are saying to each other. What they haven’t factored in is Alison becoming attracted to one of the suspects, Liam Bayne (Kieron Moore). Now that it’s got personal, Alison’s own life is in danger, but is it too late for her to walk away?
Hold the Front Page
Monday, BBC One, 10.40pm
What is it like being a journalist in the thick of a breaking world news story? Don’t ask me, but in this three-part documentary series, we meet hacks who were there when it was all kicking off, and were well placed to provide their insights as the big stories unfolded. And the first story we know all too well: the infamous Saipan episode in 2002, when Roy Keane stormed out of the Ireland World Cup training camp after a huge row with manager Mick McCarthy. A small group of Irish sports journalists had travelled nearly 12,000km with the Republic of Ireland to the tiny Japanese island to report on preparations for the World Cup, but frustration with the inadequate training facilities (there weren’t even any footballs) soon exploded into full-on anger, and before you could say “sick as a parrot”, Ireland captain Keane was on the next flight home. Journalists Stephen Watson, Tony O’Donoghue and Gabriel Egan recall the simmering tensions building up between the Manchester United star and the Ireland manager, and how they learned that the bad blood between the two men went back long before McCarthy took over as Ireland manager.
Big Zuu and AJ Tracey’s Rich Flavours
Tuesday, Sky Max & Now, 9pm
Musician and TV star Big Zuu is a man who likes his food and enjoys travelling, and this new series sees him in food and travel heaven, visiting some of his favourite places around the world and enjoying the finest cuisine on offer – money no object. He’s joined by his cousin, rapper AJ Tracey, for this global gourmet tour through east Asia, North America and Europe, and they’ll be looking for the most expensive restaurants around and ordering the most unusual and bizarre dishes on the menu.
Burkitt
Wednesday, TG4, 9.30pm
Enniskillen-born surgeon Denis Burkitt was a pioneer in dietary health, one of the first medics to recognise the importance of fibre in people’s daily diets. His work in cancer treatment led to his discovery of Burkitt’s lymphoma, and one survivor of this cancer, Éanna Mac Cana, has made this creative documentary about the life of Burkitt, who died in 1993 aged 82. This is Mac Cana’s first-ever film, and he weaves Burkitt’s archive of photographs and films with his own experience of being a cancer patient.
Uncharted with Ray Goggins
Wednesday, RTÉ One, 9.35pm
Outdoorsman extraordinaire Ray Goggins pushes celebrities to their limits in this survival show, taking them far out of their comfort zones and bringing them to wild, untamed wilderness out of reach of their social media followers. This week he’s bringing controversial rap trio Kneecap on a gruelling expedition deep into the Arctic Circle, and their destination is Scandinavia’s tri-border where Norway, Sweden and Finland meet, and where temperatures can reach minus-40 degrees. The bilingual Belfast rappers, whose self-titled film scooped a Bafta award, have faced calls for their US visas to be revoked after they ended their Coachella festival performance with pro-Palestinian messages, and have seen gigs in the UK and on the Continent cancelled after concert footage of them chanting “Up Hizbullah” and “Up Hamas” and calling for Tory MPs to be killed was uncovered. Sheesh, rock stars, what can you do with them at all? Sounds like we all could do with a bit of cooling off in the Arctic.
The Horne Section TV Show
Thursday, Channel 4, 10pm
We know and love “Little” Alex Horne, Greg Davies’s sidekick in the hit series Taskmaster. Although Horne is the actual brains behind Taskmaster, he’s been in the shadow of presenter Davies for years, but has always dreamed of fronting his own show. After finally getting the go-ahead from Channel 4 exec Ash (Georgia Tennant), he made his first series of this musical sitcom featuring his ever-loyal band The Horne Section and, amazingly, he’s persuaded Ash to commission this second series. But the pressures of fame are beginning to weigh on the bandleader, not to mention budget constraints, and he’s also suffering a little professional envy after an appearance by guest multi-instrumentalist Reggie Watts. Still, the surreal show must go on, as Horne and the band (Joe Auckland, Mark Brown, Will Collier, Ben Reynolds and Ed Sheldrake) deal with a haunted TV studio and the challenge of competing in the World’s Strongest Musician contest.
Streaming
Sirens
From Thursday, May 22nd, Netflix
Typical: you wait ages for a Kevin Bacon to come along, and two of them arrive at the same time. Hot on the heels of the fantasy horror series The Bondsman, Bacon stars with Julianne Moore in this dark comedy of power, social climbing and sexual politics. Moore and Bacon play the billionaire Kell couple, Michaela and Peter, with Milly Alcock as Michaela’s new personal assistant, Simone, and Meghann Fahy as Simone’s rebellious and protective older sister, Devon. Simone is entranced by her new boss, but Devon is suspicious of Michaela’s cult-leader style, and is determined to break her spell over her little sis. When these two strong-minded women go head to head during a Labor Day weekend at the Kells’s palatial beach estate on an exclusive island paradise, all hell breaks loose.
Clarkson’s Farm
From Friday, May 23rd, Prime Video
Farmer Jeremy Clarkson is back looking after the drainage in the lower field in this fourth series, and it looks like Clarksie is a victim of his own success. Actually, he’s a victim of farming assistant Kaleb Cooper‘s success. Kaleb is now a star in his own right, and has been touring the UK with his one-man show about his life as a farmer. Meanwhile, poor Clarksie is having to run Diddly Squat farm on his own-io, but he’s not bitter. “I want to make it plain that I am absolutely thrilled to bits for Kaleb, but he has left me just a little bit in the lurch,” he says in a not-at-all passive-aggressive way. When he interviews a new assistant, Harriet Cowan, she admits she’s never seen Clarkson’s Farm, but turns out to be brilliant at the job – will Kaleb feel threatened when he returns from his tour? Elsewhere we meet a pig named Harvey Swinestein, and one named after Clarksie’s old mucker Richard Hammond (we also meet the real Richard Hammond when he drops by Diddly Squat farm), and Clarksie decides in a moment of clarity (or madness) to buy himself a pub.
