TV tonight: Our highlights for Wednesday, May 24

Sara Pascoe with The Great British Sewing Bee 2023 contestants
The Great British Sewing Bee 2023 contestants make their debut on TV tonight. (Image credit: BBC/Love Productions/James Stack)

On TV tonight, there's a new series of The Great British Sewing Bee, there's more from Natural History Museum: World of Wonder, and Seth Rogan's new comedy Platonic starts on Apple TV+. Here's what you shouldn't miss on TV Tonight.

  • Our hand-selected recommendations for what's on TV tonight include TV shows, a film, live sport and the latest trending need-to-binge-on-now box set 
  • Keep up to date with the latest soap spoiler storylines on TV tonight with our daily soap synopsis 
  • For more information about what’s on TV tonight see our TV Guide

What's on TV tonight

Our expert TV journalists have picked the best things on TV tonight... 

Best TV shows on TV tonight

The Great British Sewing Bee, 9 pm, BBC One

The sewing room hive is humming with activity as 12 new hopeful home sewers attempt to stitch their way to Sewing Bee glory. But there are some tougher-than-ever challenges to navigate, including making a fancy outfit just from dishcloths, sponges or rubber gloves! 

Things kick off with Classics with a Twist Week, which includes a transformation challenge that involves putting a creative spin on a pencil skirt and blouse. However, things fall apart at the seams for one unlucky sewer when they face returning judges Patrick Grant and Esme Young! Sara Pascoe is back as host of this ninth series. 

★★★★ HD

Natural History Museum: World of Wonder, 8 pm, Channel 5

A File:Rhomaleosaurus discovered by Mary Anning, now in the Natural History Museum in London.

(Image credit: Wikimedia Commons)

There’s a bit of a Gothic theme to episode three. New Chair of the Board of Trustees Sir Patrick Vallance (the one-time Covid adviser) is touring the 40,000 specimens in the back-room ‘bat cave’; at a Halloween party the ‘vampire squid from hell’ is on display; and with the mounting of an exhibition about the 19th-century voyage of HMS Challenger, there is the rare chance to see terrifying-looking creatures from the ocean depths. 

Elsewhere, the museum’s dedication to conservation is in action, with Ice Age mammals expert Tori hoping to use a fossil found at Battersea Power Station in 1873 to save the rhino. 

★★★ NT

The Clearing, Disney Plus

Hulu's new TV show The Clearing

(Image credit: Hulu)

Teresa Palmer, Guy Pearce, Mark Coles Smith and Miranda Otto star in this haunting eight-part Australian psychological thriller, based on the best-selling crime novel In the Clearing by JP Pomare. It’s inspired by a disturbing real-life cult called The Family, based in Victoria from the 1960s to the 1990s, and its founder Anne Hamilton-Byrne. The story follows Freya (A Discovery of Witches’ Palmer), who lives in isolation and is forced to confront the nightmares of her past to stop a secret rural commune that’s intent on gathering children to fulfil its master plan. The first two episodes are available today. 

NC

Platonic, Apple TV+

Seth Rogen and Rose Byrne in Platonic

(Image credit: Apple TV+)

​​Rose Byrne and Seth Rogen, who co-starred in 2014’s Bad Neighbours and its 2016 sequel, team up again for this warm-hearted comedy about old pals Sylvia and Will, whose close friendship fell apart following a row. When stay-at-home mum Sylvia learns that bar worker Will is divorcing, she plucks up the courage to contact him again, and they are soon having a whole lot of fun – and a few arguments – as they relive the excesses of their student days. 

But their new-found bond also starts to make them rethink what they want from their lives… The first three episodes are available today. 

★★★★ CC

Best box set on TV tonight

Missing: Dead or Alive, Netflix

Missing: Dead or Alive? press shot of police investigating missing person cases

(Image credit: Netflix)

Missing: Dead or Alive is the latest true crime offering from the streaming giant.  Instead of focusing on classic whodunit cases or profiling a murderer, Missing: Dead or Alive follows a Missing Person team as they investigate sudden disappearances. 

Shot as a fly-on-the-wall documentary, the gripping four-parter follows officers from a South Carolina sheriff’s department as they urgently search for individuals who’ve disappeared under troubling circumstances.

Best film on TV tonight

Looper, 9 pm, Sky Showcase 

Bruce Willis holds Joseph Gordon-Levitt hostage in Looper

(Image credit: Moviestore Collection Ltd / Alamy Stock Photo)

In the future, a crime syndicate uses time travel to dispose of people without trace, sending them back 30 years to be killed by hitmen. One of the assassins employed by the Mob finds his latest target is himself as an older man, and both versions go on the run as they try to change the course of history. Sci-fi thriller, with Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Bruce Willis and Emily Blunt.

Soaps

Live Sport

  • Major League Baseball: Milwaukee Brewers v Houston Astros (Start-time 6:10 pm), BT Sport 1

If you watch just one thing on TV tonight…

Don't miss The Great British Sewing Bee on TV tonight.

Not found anything you want to watch on TV tonight? Check out our TV Guide

Happy viewing!

Lucy Buglass
Senior Staff Writer

Lucy joined the WhatToWatch.com team in 2021, where she writes series guides for must-watch programmes, reviews and the latest TV news. Originally from Northumberland, she graduated from Oxford Brookes University with a degree in Film Studies and moved to London to begin a career writing about entertainment.

She is a Rotten Tomatoes approved film critic and has a huge passion for cinema. She especially loves horror, thriller and anything crime-related. Her favourite TV programmes include Inside No 9, American Horror Story, Stranger Things and Black Mirror but she is also partial to a quiz show or a bit of Say Yes to the Dress