Channel 4 is offering a three-part look at Las Vegas that frames the city as equal parts spectacle and question, with Martin Compston as a frank, likable guide. Compston, who is married to a woman from Las Vegas, spends the opening episode exploring why the place never quite felt like home to him, from excessive hotel suites to the mechanics of gambling. He inspects a suite built around an indoor basketball court, and at a casino he plays through a hypothetical $20k across four hands of blackjack, a sequence that makes both the lures and the costs of the city plain.
The Story in Pictures
The series does not simply celebrate neon and hype. As Compston moves through casinos, clubs and neighborhoods, the programme surfaces the pull of instant excitement alongside the reasons some people feel wary. His outsider-but-connected perspective gives the documentary a conversational tone, and the three-part run leaves room to trace both showier attractions and quieter consequences.
Earlier in the evening Channel 5’s The Secrets of Your Phone asks whether smartphones are quietly tracking us, probing how personalised ads and data profiling have become normalised. Presenter Alexis Conran examines ways to build basic defences around personal information, even as the show notes how ready many people are to hand over digital profiles.
For lighter fare, U&Alibi opens series six of Shakespeare & Hathaway, with Jo Joyner and Mark Benton’s private investigators tackling a case that involves a sensory-based matchmaking service. BBC One marks 20 years of Not Going Out with a retrospective that tracks the sitcom’s near-cancellation in 2009 and how audience pressure revived it; season 15 starts immediately after the anniversary special.
Channel 4 continues builder-focused drama with Grand Designs at 9pm, where Emily and Peter plan to replace their London house with twin three-storey “cloud houses” borrowing art deco curves and pastel tones from 1930s Miami. Later, BBC One airs Sam Smith’s intimate London Coliseum concert, drawn from their Hazel Eyes tour and closing with the singer’s hit Stay With Me.
The streaming picks touch on franchise nostalgia and rom-com origins. Toy Story 5, directed by McKenna Harris and Andrew Stanton and available on Disney+, returns familiar toys while shifting leadership toward Joan Cusack’s Jessie and introducing a tablet-shaped threat, the Lilypad “Lily,” voiced by Greta Lee. On Prime Video, Claire Scanlon’s The Love Hypothesis adapts a bestselling campus romance that began life as Star Wars fan fiction, with Lili Reinhart and Tom Bateman among the leads and Bateman identified in the source material as Daisy Ridley’s husband.
Tonight’s schedule balances curiosity about modern life, from the digital trace around our phones to the glossy, risky enticements of Las Vegas, with long-running sitcom comfort and franchise cinema for younger viewers.
