Total TV Guide – 28 December 2024

Summary

Playing Nice, a James Norton thriller, anchors Total TV Guide's 4-10 January 2025 issue as the cover lead, alongside the return of Silent Witness, Call The Midwife and The Masked Singer for the first full TV week of the new year. The 114-page guide delivers day-by-day TV listings for 7 days across 60+ channels, plus separate film, sport and radio sections, and a 4-page streaming guide.

The cover features are previewed in the front section: Playing Nice is a 4-part ITV drama about two couples whose children were switched at birth; The Masked Singer returns for its sixth series on ITV; Call The Midwife continues its 14th series on BBC One. Sarah Beeny's New Life In The Country and Monty Don's British Goldens fill the factual slots. The US Guide on page 11 covers the best imports of the week.

The listings section runs from page 32 to page 110, covering all terrestrial and major satellite channels with prime-time highlights highlighted in bold. The puzzles section on page 111 offers a quick crossword, a cryptic crossword, a codeword and a sudoku. Letters on page 114 closes the issue with reader feedback and corrections.

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Content Guide

▸ Cover Features

p.4 · Playing Nice (ITV, starts Saturday)
James Norton leads a 4-part thriller about two couples who discover their toddlers were swapped at birth. The series was shot in Cornwall and Devon over 10 weeks. Each episode ends on a cliffhanger, so set the recorder for the full run before you press play on episode one.

p.6 · The Masked Singer (ITV, Saturday)
Series 6 of the singing competition returns with 12 new costumes, including a character designed by child cancer patients at Great Ormond Street. The judging panel adds a rotating fifth seat. Watch for the clue packages — one character's voice has been digitally disguised to sound like a children's TV presenter.

p.8 · Call The Midwife (BBC One, Sunday)
Series 14 opens with a 1969-set episode featuring a measles outbreak in Poplar. The show's medical consultant confirms the outbreak storyline was reviewed by the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. Sister Monica Joan's memory loss plotline continues from the Christmas special.

p.10 · Silent Witness (BBC One, Monday-Tuesday)
Series 28 opens with a 2-part story about forensic anthropology on a mass-grave excavation in northern England. Emilia Fox and David Caves return as Nikki and Jack. The grave site was built on a Ministry of Defence training area, giving the production access to authentic terrain.

▸ Regulars

p.12 · Sarah Beeny's New Life In The Country (Channel 4)
Beeny returns for a second series documenting the renovation of her Somerset dairy farm. This episode covers the installation of a biomass boiler and a 12-panel solar array. The payback period at current energy prices is 8 years.

p.19 · Streaming Guide
Netflix, Disney+, Apple TV+ and Prime Video picks for the week. One entry flags a documentary about the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami that includes survivor testimony recorded for the first time. The runtime is 94 minutes.

p.111 · Puzzles
Quick crossword, cryptic crossword, codeword and sudoku. The cryptic crossword constructor is a regular setter for The Times, so expect a few anagrams of European capital cities.

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Editor's Take

Total TV Guide delivers exactly what it promises: a comprehensive, easy-to-navigate 7-day listing for UK households that still rely on linear TV. The Playing Nice preview is genuinely useful — it flags the episode count and the cliffhanger structure in a way the Radio Times does not always do. The weakness is the sheer volume of advertising: roughly 35 pages of the 114 are full-page or half-page ads, which makes flipping through the listings feel cluttered. The streaming section is too short at 4 pages given that half of UK households now subscribe to at least one service. The puzzles section is solid but unchanged from the previous issue's format. This issue is for the household that organises its week around BBC One, ITV and Channel 4 schedules, not for the cord-cutter.

Strengths
• Clear 7-day listings with bold prime-time highlights
• Playing Nice preview with episode-count alert
• Separate film, sport and radio indexes

Weaknesses
• Ad density approaches one-third of total pages
• Streaming section undersized for current viewing habits

Verdict: Selective read — Functional and thorough, but the advertising load reduces value for the cover price.