Which Quiz Shows Are On UK TV Each Weekday? Countdown 2.10pm, The Chase 5pm, Pointless

Quick answer

• Four quizzes run every weekday: Countdown at 2.10pm on Channel 4, Tipping Point at 4pm and The Chase at 5pm on ITV1, Pointless at 5.15pm on BBC One.
• Monday adds a second shift — Mastermind, Only Connect and University Challenge, back to back on BBC Two from 7.30pm.
• Every one of them goes to Channel 4 streaming, ITVX or BBC iPlayer after broadcast, so none of this has to be watched live.

Which quiz shows are on UK TV every weekday?

Four, across three channels, and they run in a fairly tidy line from early afternoon to teatime.

That is three hours and thirty-five minutes of quizzing on an ordinary Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday or Friday. Channel 4 takes the first slice on its own, then nothing happens for an hour and ten minutes, and the other three arrive in a rush from 4pm.

Each has its own page here with the full picture: Countdown, Tipping Point, The Chase and Pointless.

What is on BBC Two on a Monday night?

Three half-hours in a row, and they are the reason a Monday looks nothing like the rest of the week.

Ninety unbroken minutes takes Monday's total to five hours and five minutes, which is an hour and a half more than any other weekday. The rounds, the scoring and the iPlayer timings are all set out in our Monday night guide.

Nothing on ITV1 or Channel 4 answers this block. The commercial channels put drama and entertainment in that part of the evening and leave the quizzes at teatime.

Do The Chase and Pointless clash?

They do, and it is the only real collision in the grid. The Chase runs 5pm to 6pm on ITV1; Pointless starts at 5.15pm on BBC One and also finishes at 6pm. That is a 45-minute overlap, five days a week.

In practice you get the first fifteen minutes of The Chase clean — the cash builder and usually the first head-to-head — before Pointless begins. After that it is one or the other live, and the loser of that choice goes to catch-up. Both are up on their respective streaming services shortly after the credits.

Countdown and Tipping Point have no such problem. They sit an hour and ten minutes apart, and Tipping Point finishes exactly as The Chase begins.

Where can I stream each one afterwards?

All four weekday quizzes and all three Monday ones are on catch-up, but on three different services:

• Channel 4 streaming — Countdown, after the 2.10pm broadcast.
• ITVX — Tipping Point and The Chase, after broadcast. ITVX also carries older series and the celebrity spin-offs.
• BBC iPlayer — Pointless, Mastermind, Only Connect and University Challenge, after broadcast.

Unlike the soaps, where episodes appear on streaming hours before they reach television, the quizzes go the other way round: broadcast first, streaming second. Our sister site UK Soap On Air covers the morning drop model, which works very differently.

Why does a quiz sometimes go missing from the schedule?

Almost always because of live sport, and almost always on ITV1. When ITV carries a midweek cup tie or an international, the football takes the whole evening and the teatime hour can be shortened, shifted or dropped altogether. That is what happened on 16 September, when the Carabao Cup took over.

BBC One moves Pointless less often, but it does happen — tournament coverage, a state occasion, a long news special. The BBC Two Monday block is the steadiest of the lot, because BBC Two rarely carries live sport at that hour.

When a change is confirmed we write it up. The running week-by-week picture is in this week's line-up, and the results page records what actually aired.

Which channel has the most quiz hours?

ITV1, comfortably. Two hours a day, five days a week, is ten hours — more than the BBC's two channels manage together even with the Monday block, which comes to five hours and fifteen minutes across BBC One and BBC Two. Channel 4's four hours and ten minutes of Countdown is the smallest share and the most consistent: same time, same length, every weekday.

Put another way, a viewer who watched everything would spend just under twenty hours a week on British quiz television, and roughly half of it on one commercial channel.

Questions readers ask

Are these new episodes or repeats? The weekday four are new runs when a series is in transmission, which is most of the year. Daytime repeats of older Chase and Tipping Point episodes also fill slots on ITV1 and the ITV Quiz channel, and those are billed separately.

Is there quiz television at the weekend? Not from these seven. Saturday and Sunday belong to entertainment formats and celebrity specials, which appear when they are scheduled rather than on a fixed weekly slot.

Do the times change in the school holidays? The teatime hour is stable, but ITV1's afternoon schedule shifts around racing and major sport, so Tipping Point is the most likely of the four to move by fifteen or thirty minutes.

Sources

• BBC schedules, BBC One and BBC Two — bbc.co.uk/schedules (21 September 2026).
• Channel 4 programme pages for Countdown — channel4.com.
• ITV guide, ITV1 listings — itv.com/watch/tv-guide.
• TVmaze UK schedule — api.tvmaze.com (country GB).

By the UK Quiz On Air desk · Updated 21 September, 9.18am BST