The Voice and The Big Deal with Steph McGovern: TV highlights this week

The Voice UK (Saturday 22/08/26, ITV1, 7pm)

Words by Rachael Popow

Saturday night ITV1 audiences, can you handle this? Because not only is singing contest The Voice UK back, but there’s a new addition to the coaching line-up in the form of one-time Destiny Child’s member Kelly Rowland.

Not only has she scored hits with the girl group and as a solo star, but she’s also got an impressive track record when it comes to identifying future stars. When she was a judge on The X Factor back in 2011, Kelly mentored the Girls category but has been credited with helping to finalise the line-up of eventual winners and chart-toppers Little Mix.

She’s taking over the spinning chair vacated by country singer LeAnn Rimes and she clearly can’t wait to get started. When it was announced she was joining the show, Kelly said: “I am excited to join The Voice UK as a coach, and am looking forward to working with the excellent and passionate coaches the show is known for. I can’t wait to hear all the new talent and to go to battle for my team. Let’s go!”

Those other coaches are Will.i.am, who has been with the series since it began on BBC One back in 2012. He’s joined again by Tom Jones, who was also part of that inaugural line-up, only missing series five, and relative newcomers, McFly’s Tom Fletcher and Danny Jones. They made their debut in the last series as the Voice’s UK’s first-ever duo coach and arguably proved that two heads are better than one by guiding Ava to victory.

Will.i.am is certainly excited about this line-up saying: “If you thought last year was dope, this year we’ve got Kelly Rowland who’s gonna take this season to the dopest level possible! We’ve got Danny and Tom who are the super dope duo, and the dopest legend of them all is back – Sir Tom Jones.

“The whole point of this show is to watch aspirational, ambitious singers pursue their dreams – it’s a joy prescription for a healthy amount of dopamine that brings love to our lives.”

That’s a sentiment echoed by returning presenter Emma Willis, who has managed to squeeze this series in before she takes over as a new presenter on another Saturday night staple, Strictly Come Dancing.

She says: “I’m so excited to be back for another series of The Voice UK. It’s one of the most joyful shows to work on – full of passion, talent and of course those unforgettable moments when the chairs turn. With our brilliant coaches returning and the utterly fabulous Kelly Rowland joining the panel, I know this series is going to be something really special.”

As regular viewers will know, the series begins with the blind auditions, when would be stars take to the stage and try to get the coaches to spin their chairs around based on the power of their voice alone.

This year, there’s a new twist as each coach has a rewind button they can use to bring back an act who left the stage without a single chair turn. However, they can only use it once.

The Joy of Pets (Sunday 23/08/26, ITV1, 11.30am)

Words by Damon Smith

Britain is a nation of animal lovers and a new five-part series hosted by Gaby Roslin celebrates the UK’s passion for pets of all shapes and sizes.

On Sunday mornings, she travels around the nation with vet Bolu Eso to explore the unbreakable bond between animals and their human owners. Each week, the pair hear uplifting stories of companionship, devotion and loyalty, encountering creatures that have not just boosted mental wellbeing but have also saved lives.

In the opening episode, Gaby and Bolu head to Horsham in West Sussex where a blind rescue husky gets a second chance at tail-wagging happiness in a foster home. A pet rat receives surgery and the programme introduces viewers to canicross, a fast-growing sport of cross-country running with a dog.

The Joy of Pets arrives on ITV a couple of months after the end of the heartwarming third series of For the Love of Dogs with Alison Hammond, filmed at Battersea Dogs & Cats Home in London. These hour-long episodes are the work of Glasgow-based Bandicoot, makers of The Masked Singer.

Amusingly, the company’s official website puts its best paw forward by proudly listing a border terrier named Gordy as the official Head of Happiness. According to his bio, the four-legged team player “brings a smile to the faces of all who meet him and asks only for a tummy rub in return”.

Gaby came up with the idea of The Joy of Pets and wanted to be part of a feelgood show that highlights the enjoyment that animals bring into our lives. She traces her love of critters back to her childhood and growing up in a house filled with two- and four-legged companions.

“My mother was obsessed with animals so that’s definitely where I got it from.” Gaby explains. “She was adamant that they stayed out of cages… the tortoise used to go running with the dog in the garden! And then we got another dog and my mum bred her, so we had puppies running round and we kept one of them.”

Keeping pets cool in the current heatwave is something that concerns vet Bolu. There was a dedicated welfare team on set, keeping a close eye on the pets, and even when he was on camera, Bolu was always paying attention to their needs such as filming a segment in the shade.

“We even had a doggy paddling pool on set,” he confesses. “If I saw a pet was getting a little hot, I would dowse them in water. So, we had everything we needed on set.”

Reflecting on the series and the different animals she has met, Gaby would love to take home alpacas to Central London but, sadly, she doesn’t have a garden big enough to accommodate them. A slightly smaller creature may become part of the family though. “A house tortoise – I want one!” she enthuses. Her husband is allergic to dogs and cats so hopefully a reptile will be just what the vet ordered.

Long Lost Family: Born Without Trace – What Happened Next (Monday 24/08/26, ITV1, 9pm)

Words by Damon Smith

There’s seldom a dry eye when the award-winning documentary series Long Lost Family reunites families using intermediaries, painstaking detective work and DNA matching. The main show, its spin-offs and specials have conducted over 1,300 searches on six continents on behalf of adopted or abandoned contributors, resulting in over 880 reunions.

Earlier this year, Long Lost Family was inducted into the Hall of Fame at The Broadcast Awards. Comedy series Gavin & Stacey was last year’s inaugural recipient of the honour, which recognises programmes that have achieved iconic status in British television. Judges honoured the groundbreaking factual series for its sustained quality, emotional depth and cultural impact over more than a decade.

Hosted by Davina McCall and Nicky Campbell, Long Lost Family: Born Without Trace focuses on foundlings who are determined to track down the people who abandoned them as babies and the catch-up What Happened Next revisits some of the memorable participants who have filled in missing pieces of their personal histories with help from the show.

Tonight’s episode remembers a 2022 episode featuring the moving story of Natasha Carr from Hackney, who had been abandoned in 1989 as a baby in the toilets of St Thomas’s Hospital in London. She was fostered and adopted at the age of two but had no idea who left her there.

At the time of broadcast, Natasha was the youngest foundling to approach the show to help her unravel the mystery of her past.

The search on the original episode lasted four years, one of the longest in the show’s history, and although experts couldn’t track down Natasha’s biological parents, they used a sample of her DNA to match to a full sister called Lee-Ann, who was 18 months older.

Remarkably, Lee-Ann was also a foundling and had been left in the staff toilets at St James’s Hospital in Balham when she was a few days old. The long-lost siblings had both been found in similar blankets.

When host Davina McCall met with Natasha to deliver an update on the search, the foundling broke down in tears to discover she had a sister. “It’s so lovely and to have someone that has the same experience,” Natasha remarked. “No one will ever understand unless you’re in the exact same situation and she literally was in the exact same situation.” Discover how Natasha and Lee-Ann’s relationship has developed since filming ended.

Also tonight, What Happened Next revisits the story of university professor Liz Deutsch from Herefordshire, who was found in 1965 at six days old in a shopping basket in Birmingham. She had been placed into foster care and made her own way in the world from the age of 16 but engaged the show to use DNA and other evidence to trace her ancestral roots.

Two years after her episode first broadcast, the academic reflects on her experience and efforts to keep in touch with other relatives.

Race Against the Tide (Tuesday 25/08/26, BBC2, 7.30pm)

Words by Rachael Popow

We’ve had competitions for cooks, bakers, painters, interior designers, hairdressers, potters and make-up artists, to name just a few. However, Race Against the Tide may seem like the most niche contest yet as it turns the spotlight on sand sculptors.

If you missed last week’s opening episode, it sees a professional sand artist teaming up with a complete newcomer to the craft to make stunning creations before the sea comes in to wash their work away.

The job of judging their efforts falls to acclaimed artist and sculptor Sadie Clayton and internationally renowned sand sculptor Jamie Wardley, while the host is comedian Iain Stirling.

One of his other summer jobs is narrating Love Island, and some cynics may have questioned whether the participants in that reality show are really there to find romance or whether they see it as route to celebrity. As Iain points out though, no one could level that accusation at Race Against the Tide.

He explains: “Everyone involved is so passionate about the topic. All the sand sculptors featured in the show do it because they love it. I can’t imagine any of them started sand sculpting thinking, ‘this is my route to fame and fortune.’ So, they’ve all done it because they’re incredibly passionate about it.”

As the time slot suggests, this series is also a lot more family friendly. Iain says: “[As] a stand-up comedian with young children, there’s not a lot of stuff I do on telly that they can see so I really wanted to make something that I could watch with my daughter, and that would make her passionate about wanting to go outside and do a thing.

“And since I’ve done it, we go to the beach, and we make sandcastles together and it’s been such a wholesome and fun thing.”

Then there’s the fact that unlike on some series we could mention, where the time allotted to a challenge seems fairly arbitrary, in this show it’s nature that calls the shots. Iain says: “It’s sort of crazy in the world of TV because there’s always variables that you can control a bit – if something goes wrong, we can all go, ‘Right, let’s all pause for lunch, we’ll stop the clocks.’

“But with this show, you literally couldn’t. So, the jeopardy was palpable in real time, and hopefully that translates onto the telly as well. When the tide’s coming in, the tide’s coming in and there’s nothing you can do about it.”

This week, the six remaining teams will be hoping time is on their side as they set up on St Andrews beach, ready to make sculptures that reflect what home means to them. They draw inspiration from everything from Welsh valleys and family legacies to artistic studios and symbols of rebirth, but who will impress the judges and be named Sand Champions, and who will be packing up their buckets and spades?

The Great Wall of China with Dan Snow (Wednesday 26/08/2026, 5, 9pm)

Words by Richard Jones

Surely Dan Snow is running out of historical places and people to feature in his TV programmes?

Over the past few years alone, the Westminster-born historian, author and presenter has covered Tutankhamun, the Dambusters, the Valley of the Kings, the Black Death, Pompeii, Atlantis, Stonehenge, the Terracotta Army, the Colosseum, Machu Picchu and the Odyssey.

Dan, 47, presented his first history show – a BBC special on the battles of El Alamein – with his father, BBC journalist Peter Snow, in October 2002.

However, in an interview on the LBC podcast Full Disclosure With James O’Brien two decades later, he revealed that his dad actually “urged him not to go into this industry”.

He also added: “I’d die now if my kids wanted to become broadcasters. I’m like, ‘please go and become bioengineers or something exciting’.”

Saying all that, Dan seems to be having a ball as he enthusiastically travels the world and imparts interesting nuggets of information about the past to us viewers.

For his latest documentary for 5, the presenter heads to the one of the world’s most iconic landmarks, a place where he previously visited for his podcast Dan Snow’s History Hit.

Despite the myth, the Great Wall of China cannot be seen from space, but it is, nevertheless, a world heritage site recognisable across the world.

But what do we really know about the Great Wall – the world’s biggest building project and one that changed the course of Chinese history.

Away from the tourist sites and the postcard landscapes, Dan separates out the myths from the truths, and to do that, he will be travelling across the huge country.

From the sea in the east where the 3,170 mile-long Great Wall begins by dipping into the ocean, to the jagged peaks around Beijing that form some of the best known images of the wall and are home to some of the most visited sections of the Great Wall.

And then out into the west, where Dan discovers some of the most remote sections of the wall in some extreme locations before finally setting foot in the mighty Gobi Desert at the furthest end of the wall.

Along the way, he will find out the true age of the Great Wall and reveal surprising facts about how long it really is.

Dan will learn about the astonishing engineering and the ingenious materials like sticky rice mortar, rammed earth, desert reeds, mountain stone and fired bricks that were used centuries ago in the building of the Great Wall.

He’ll discover the stories of the millions of soldiers, forced peasants, prisoners and local people who were tasked with building it and sent to live along it over 2,000 years ago.

And one of the main questions he has is: why the wall was built in the first place?

Perhaps it had something to do with protecting ancient Chinese states and empires from foreign invasions by northern nomadic tribes, controlling border trade and regulating immigration along the Silk Road.

During this hour-long programme, Dan makes plenty of discoveries, once again proving that people and places can surprise history boffins like him who seem to have experienced most things.

The Big Deal with Steph McGovern (Thursday 27/08/26, BBC2, 8pm)

Words by Rachael Popow

If you’ve watched the first two episodes of The Big Deal, which follows pairs of aspiring art dealers as they try to show they have what it takes to make it in this competitive world, then you’ll know how important it is to have an eye for talent.

However, the BBC didn’t have to look very hard to find the perfect host for this series – as Steph McGovern points out, the role could have been custom made for her.

She says: “My dad’s an artist so I grew up in a home full of curiosities. The kids in our neighbourhood found it weird coming to our house with the life-like sculptures in the garden and his curious paintings inside. He went to the Royal College of Art, which was an amazing achievement for a working-class kid, but the realities of trying to make a living out of it meant he also had to take on teaching jobs.

“As a business journalist who loves art, I jumped at the chance to host a show looking at how to deal art. My dad was the first person I called when I got this job.”

She’s also passionate about making sure that art is seen as accessible. Steph explains: “Art is for everyone. We all like nice things on our walls and that could be anything from a cheap poster to something you’ve spent loads of money on, or one your kids’ pictures. No one should be excluded from being part of the art world, whether as a creator, a collector or someone wanting to cash in.”

She adds: “On The Big Deal we show that, despite appearances, the art market is no different to other businesses. You just have to know the rules of the game. The key thing I came away with is that it’s all about the art of storytelling; work out what the artist is trying to tell the world and then get that across to potential buyers.

“Nail that and there is money to be made whatever your background or experiences in life.”

Let’s hope the five remaining pairs have the gift of the gab as this week as they are challenged to sell prints and limited editions directly to the public in Margate, the traditional seaside town that’s been transformed into a vibrant art destination. Judge Cordelia de Freitas is joined by local artist and gallery owner Margo McDaid to assess their progress.

But what piece of art would Steph most want to buy from one of the dealers if money was no object? She says: “If it was a painting, it’d be a Hockney – one of his amazing pieces of Yorkshire. He is the perfect example of someone who didn’t change to fit in, and the world loved him for it.

“If it was a sculpture, it would be an Antony Gormley. Maybe I’d commission my own version of the Angel of the North, for the garden?”

The Marlow Murder Club (Friday 28/08/2026, BBC Two, 9pm)

Words by Richard Jones

It was recently announced that The Marlow Murder Club will be returning for a fourth season on U&Drama in 2027.

The new run will feature an adaptation of Robert Thorogood’s novel Murder on the Marlow Belle, alongside brand-new original mysteries.

However, for those who haven’t seen the first three series of the much-loved crime drama, the BBC is taking us back to the beginning.

It follows a trio of older women – Judith Potts (Samantha Bond) a retired archaeologist who sets crosswords for the local newspaper, Becks Starling (Cara Horgan), a former music industry executive struggling to adapt to her new life as the vicar’s wife, and professional dog walker Suzie Harris (Jo Martin).

They form a club to investigate a series of murders in the picturesque Buckinghamshire town of Marlow.

Detective Sergeant Tanika Malik (Natalie Dew), who leads the Buckinghamshire Police’s response while DI Gareth Hoskins is on leave, is initially sceptical of the gumshoeing trio, but when they prove their worth, she hires them as official civilian advisors.

“The three of them become a very unlikely collections of sleuths,” Bond said in an interview with TV Insider in 2024.

“Judith does the forensics thinking, Becks has a lot of local knowledge and Suzie is the impulsive bit.”

In the first episode, during her daily swim in the River Thames beside her inherited antique-filled mansion, Judith overhears a gunshot and suspects her neighbour, art dealer Stefan Dunwoody, has been murdered.

She poles herself across the river to Stefan’s and looks around. First, she finds a bullet casing near a bench next to a tributary of the river. Then, she uses a branch to clear the leaves on top of a pond downstream and finds Stefan’s pale face, its forehead marked by a bullet wound. His body must have drifted from the tributary to the pond.

Judith calls the police – but uses her archaeology tools to snap a photo of the bullet casing and its measurements first.

With the police reluctant to believe her story, she mounts her own investigation and quickly suspects antiques dealer Elliot Howard, Stefan’s longtime nemesis, was responsible.

Becks confirms Elliot’s alibi – his presence at parish choir practise – but both women continue to suspect him of wrongdoing and decide to venture to the church to find out more.

Later, while Judith is speaking to Tanika about the case, a detective pops his head in to say that another person has been shot in Marlow.

Taxi driver Iqbal Kassam was due to pick up Suzie’s daughter Zeta from the airport.

But Zeta called her daughter at the last minute to say that she had changed the flight.

Immediately after getting off the phone, Suzie arrived at Iqbal’s house to drop his dog off. She finds the door open, and Iqbal dead in a blood-spattered bed.

Although there seems to be a lot of ‘cosy crime dramas’ on the TV at the moment (Ludwig, Beyond Paradise and Shakespeare & Hathaway, to name but three), in an interview with Radio Times, Bond said she doesn’t like the label being bestowed on the show.

“I loathe the term cosy crime, but if the plots are intriguing, challenging and thought-provoking, and you don’t actually have to see the violence, that has a huge appeal.”

The fact that this show is already onto its fourth run (next year) shows there is definitely that.