Staying In: What To Do At Home This Spring
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2 hours ago
Seasonal recipes, buzzy new books, TV launches and gardening inspiration
While the sunnier weather often means we’re out and about more, spring at home also brings plenty of joy. This season offers bountiful fresh produce, meaning it’s a great time to get stuck into some seasonal cooking – think wild garlic risotto, leafy green salads and asparagus aplenty. There’s lots to be getting on with in the garden too, whether that’s getting green-fingered with some flower planting or simply lying on the grass with a chilled glass of rosé and a good book (2026 has already been a particularly good year for new fiction). And let’s be honest: whatever the weather we’re always up for a bit of TV time, and thankfully April has seen a spate of exciting show launches too. Read on for your ultimate guide to staying in this month.
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The C&TH Staying In Guide: April 2026
WATCH
Cailee Spaeny as Ashley Miller & Carey Mulligan as Lindsay Crane-Martin in Beef season 2. (Netflix © 2026)
Beef
Season 1 was a surprise hit when it launched back in 2023 – and now Beef is back for season 2. While season 1 spiralled out of a road rage incident, there’s a new squabble at the core of season 2; this time it’s more subtle, more psychological, more sly. Showcasing a seemingly insurmountable rift between two couples – recently engaged Gen Z couple Ashley (Cailee Spaeny) and Austin (Charles Melton), and their millennial counterparts Josh (Oscar Isaac) and his wife Lindsay (Carey Mulligan) – it’s all backdropped by their shared country club workplace. Ashley and Austin are bottom-of-the-food-chain staff, while Josh is their manager. But when they witness an alarming fight between Josh and his wife Lindsay, they are suddenly swept up in their dysfunctional marriage. Both couples use dirty tricks in an attempt to win the approval of the country club’s billionaire owner, Chairwoman Park (Youn Yuh-jung), who herself is enwrapped in scandal with her second husband, Dr Kim (Song Kang-ho).
Euphoria
Sam Levinson’s Euphoria is officially back – a mammoth four years after season 2 aired in 2022. It’s the show that saw Zendaya transition from lighthearted childstar-turned-superhero love interest to bonafide serious actor as she took on the role of teenage drug addict Rue Bennett struggling to navigate high school following a stint in rehab. Also starring now-household names like Jacob Elordi, Hunter Schafer and Sydney Sweeney, season 3 flashes forward five years. Rue’s high school friend group – Lexi (Maude Apatow), Maddy (Alexa Demie), Nate (Elordi), Cassie (Sweeney), Jules (Schafer) – is splintered across the nation and across lifestyle choices; think talent managers, construction workers and sugar babies. Rue, however, is on familiar turf, working as a drug mule for Laurie (Martha Kelly), the teacher-turned-dealer we met in season 2.
Joanna Scanlan as Sarah Gleason in Missed Call. (Channel 5)
Missed Call
Catch BAFTA-winning British star Joanna Scanlan in the new Channel 5 show Missed Call, in which she plays mother Sarah Gleason whose daughter Katie mysteriously goes missing during a French exchange in the south of France. This comes after Sarah misses a call from Katie in the middle of the night; the next morning her daughter doesn’t reply – and despite her host family insisting she’s fine, something feels off. Sarah rushes to Saint-Michel, where ‘no one else is prepared to kind of really take it seriously,’ Scanlan tells C&TH. There she meets the Morvans, Katie’s powerful yet strangely hostile host family, as well as the evasive local police, led by detective Lieutenant Virginie Taylor (Claire Keim). But Sarah is not one to be intimidated. ‘Oh, she’s tough,’ Scanlan says. ‘She’s determined. She’s a challenger, and she’s unapologetic.’ As she grapples to find her daughter, Sarah uncovers something unexpected in this supposedly innocent, tight-knit town: buried secrets, abuse, corruption – and even a history of trafficking.
Secret Garden
There are few broadcasters who have made as much of a positive impact on the world than David Attenborough. A true British national treasure, he’s turning 100 on 8 May 2026 and the BBC is marking the occasion by giving us a bumper week of Attenborough content. This includes Secret Garden, a five-part series which explores the surprising animals inhabiting our backyards – from dormice in South Wales to otters in Oxfordshire to blue tits in Bristol and pine martens in the Western Highlands. ‘Theirs is no cosy existence – even in these beautiful and seemingly genteel surroundings the rules of the wild still operate,’ reads the synopsis.
The Testaments
The Handmaid’s Tale may have wrapped up with its sixth and final season last spring, but our time in Gilead is far from over. In the works as early as 2023, new episodes of The Testaments are dropping weekly on Disney+. Based on Margaret Atwood’s 2019 Booker Prize winning novel of the same name, the action opens about 15 years after the events of her agenda-setting 1985 dystopia The Handmaid’s Tale – or about 10 years after the expanded events of the TV series. Bringing Aunt Lydia (Ann Dowd) back to the fore, this time we centre on teens Agnes (Chase Infiniti) and Daisy (Lucy Halliday) as they navigate the halls of Gilead’s preparatory school for future wives. Dutiful and pious Agnes is top of the heap, while Daisy is a new arrival and convert from Canada – but both are set to uncover secrets that flip their worlds upside down…
Taylor Ortega as Morgan and Dan Levy as Nicky BIG MISTAKES. (Spencer Pazer/Netflix © 2025)
Big Mistakes
If you loved Schitt’s Creek, we come bearing good news: Dan Levy’s new comedy/crime drama is now streaming on Netflix. And similarly to Schitt’s Creek, we centre on two deeply incapable siblings, though this time they don’t fall from a life of luxury. Instead, queer priest Nicky (Levy) and his sister Morgan (Taylor Ortega) journey on a hilariously chaotic ride as they are blackmailed into the world of organised crime following a spot of ill-advised petty theft on the behalf of their ailing grandmother. As Nicky preaches in the trailer, ‘Fear has this ability to coerce us into doing things we never envisioned ourselves doing.’ Think odd jobs for shady characters. They’re joined by their blissfully unaware mother Linda (Laurie Metcalf) as they’re unwittingly pulled deeper into the underworld.
Young Niall (MITCHELL ROBERTSON) & Young Ruben (STUART CAMPBELL) in Half Man. (BBC/Mam Tor Productions/Anne Binckebanck)
Half Man
If you had the pleasure of watching Baby Reindeer back when it first landed on Netflix in 2024, you will remember that it was barely a pleasure at all. But before he dissected his personal life for Britain’s – and the world’s – very public consumption, Gadd penned a very different television series, one set in his homeland of Scotland. This is Half Man, which launched on BBC iPlayer in the wee hours of the morning, with new episodes landing weekly on Fridays until the end of May. And while he does star in Half Man, luckily there’s no more true stories for Gadd – for now, at least. Instead he plays the explosive, impulsive Ruben, who shows up at the wedding of childhood best friend of Niall (Jamie Bell), reuniting the duo for the first time in years, and catapulting us all back on a journey through their adolescence, into the adulthood that splintered their friendship.
First episode drops 24 April, BBC iPlayer
The Pitt
If medical dramas are your bag (and you’re not too squeamish), The Pitt is about to become your next TV obsession. The gripping show has developed a cult fanbase in the US since debuting in 2025, and all 15 episodes of the first season are now available to stream on this side of the pond through HBO Max. Set in the emergency department of a busy Pittsburgh hospital, the show takes place in real-time across one gruelling 15-hour shift – think 24 meets ER. At the centre is Dr Michael ‘Robby’ Robinavitch (played by Noah Wyle), who rose to fame for his role as junior doctor John Carter in ER. In The Pitt, he plays the traumatised yet empathetic senior attending physician at The Pitt – his nickname for the under-resourced department where doctors and nurses are pushed to their limits as they deal with the fallout from festival shootings, a measles outbreak and fentanyl overdoses.
READ
Few and Far Between by Jan Carson
In 1958, Northern Ireland’s finance minister Terence O’Neill proposed a plan to drain the Lough Neagh archipelago and create a seventh county. Though he later tried to push the plans through when he became prime minister in 1963, the controversial scheme ultimately failed. Jan Carson’s latest novel Few and Far Between may be entirely fictional, but it was learning of the proposed draining that set the award-winning author down the rabbit hole which led her to this tale. Set in the summer of 2017, the story follows Robert-John Connolly, his wife Marion Connolly, their now grown-up children, and their neighbour Sandra, who all moved to Lough Neagh back in the 1970s to escape the worst of the Troubles. Now facing a devastating algae outbreak, it’s been decided that the only way to fix the environmental crisis is to flood the archipelago and submerge their homes. Forced to return to the mainland for the first time in 50 years, the novel questions how they will ever leave their past behind.
The Daffodil Days by Helen Bain
In July 1961 the newly-married poets Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes fell in love with Court Green, a tumbledown, ochre-hued thatch cottage in Devon. Abandoning London for the dream of raising their young children in the countryside, they were so close ‘you couldn’t get a piece of paper between the two of them’, according to a friend. Tragically, Ted walked out just over a year later, and Sylvia ended her life soon after. But this novel by Helen Bain covers the brief idyll when Sylvia kept hens and bees, planted vegetables, gathered daffodils and painted vintage furniture with hearts and flowers. Bain brings Sylvia to life with extraordinary skill, voicing each chapter from the perspective of a different villager to conjure this tall, confident, demanding, courageous and vulnerable American, as she tries to fit into rural English life. It’s exquisitely written.
Into The Wreck by Susannah Dickey
The third novel from Derry-born Tennis Lessons author, Susannah Dickey, Into The Wreck poses the question: how do you mourn someone you never really knew? Centred around the death of the family’s gentle but distant patriarch, this novel is told from five perspectives: that of his children Anna, Gemma and Matthew, his wife Yvonne, and her sister Amy. Reunited with their mother for the first time in a long time, the siblings must balance their everyday concerns against the looming spectre of their father’s recent death. Newly sex-obsessed Gemma needs to work out what she wants from life; Anna has to solve the issue of her not-quite-exclusive boyfriend, and aunt Amy is forced to confront her past – all while Yvonne attempts to pull off the perfect, post-funeral family dinner. Worrying at the knotty complexities of their fraying bonds, this book promises an insightful exploration of family dynamics punctuated with Dickey’s trademark wit and empathy.
I’ll Take The Fire by Leïla Slimani
I’ll Take the Fire is the third book in Leïla Slimani‘s acclaimed Moroccan trilogy, an addictive family saga in which three generations of women navigate the day-to-day frustrations of love and life within the constraints of a deeply patriarchal culture,’ she tells us. ‘In this final volume, sisters Mia and Inés escape to Paris, the place Slimani herself fled to aged seventeen. She is now President Macron’s ambassador for French language and culture but never forgets her Moroccan roots and this novel contains a touching fictional portrait of her late, much-loved father, a government economist in Rabat. I’ll Take the Fire is a fine standalone novel that touches your heart even more deeply if you’ve followed the family’s story from the beginning. As a whole, the trilogy gives a remarkable personal insight into decades of political struggle in this beautiful and extraordinary country.
Out 24 April, Faber, £16.99
The News from Dublin by Colm Tóibín
Colm Tóibín never saw himself as a short story writer. He tried again and again and it never seemed to work. That is until he found himself in a hotel in 2004 with a little pad of paper beside the phone. He wrote down the first sentence of a tale and his first short story grew from there. Though best known for the film-adapted Brooklyn, today the award-winning Irish author has two short story collections under his belt, with his third in 15 years out now. Titled The News From Dublin, this collection delves into the days and nights of those living far from home: from a woman in Galway learning of the death of her son in the First World War and an Irishman seeking anonymity in Barcelona, to a young lady who finds herself pregnant during the Spanish Civil War and an undocumented worker forced to flee San Francisco, and his child.
DO
(c) Rosebie Morton
Grow Dahlias
It’s time to sow some seeds and revive your winter-worn garden. Our bloom of choice? Dahlias. ‘Flowering from mid-summer to early winter, few other flowers can rival dahlias for sheer flower power,’ says Rosebie Morton, founder of The Real Flower Company. ‘They come in a huge range of colours, from the palest muted tones to bright electric pinks and purples, and in many different shapes, including pompom, ball, cactus, waterlily, anemone or even dinnerplate.’ You’ll find dahlias in local garden centres at this time of year, typically in a state of pre-bloom. (‘Don’t be put off by the brown mass of roots, known as tubers, with the dead stems at the top,’ emphasises Rosebie. ‘This unprepossessing lump will quickly burst into life.’) See here for more of Rosebie’s top gardening tips.
Paper The Walls Black
Now, we know what you’re thinking. Black? On the walls? It might seem a little dramatic (and, at times, scary), but trust us – you won’t find a chicer choice when it comes to wallpaper. ‘Black wallpapers add drama and sophistication to a scheme,’ agrees Chloe Vince, senior decorating consultant at House of Hackney. ‘They’re made for creating intimate spaces, since black absorbs light rather than reflects it.’ She adds that black is perfect for helping other colours in your scheme pop, letting them appear bolder and brighter. ‘For a twist on a classic, opt for florals painted against a backdrop of soft black accented with rich tones of mocha, chocolate and pinky browns,’ she recommends. ‘It’s a great choice for those wanting to achieve a timeless scheme.’ However you choose to decorate the wall – thick black stripes, contrasting florals, monochromatic murals or something else entirely – be prepared with our edit of the most beautiful black wallpapers.
House of Hackney
Make The Most Of Wild Garlic Season
Nothing heralds the beginning of spring like the unmistakable scent of wild garlic. Around this time of year, the pungent plant begins covering woodlands – hence its popularity with foragers. But how to begin if you’re new to the world of wild food? First thing’s first: be respectful of the forager code, says plant-based cook Bettina Campolucci Bordi. ‘Only take a small amount for yourself and leave enough for your foraging comrades and furry critters that thrive off the land,’ she says. ‘Even though the bulb is edible, make sure to leave it behind and pick right at the soil root to ensure it grows next year for you to enjoy in all its wild glory again.’ If foraging isn’t for you, the spring herb is also easily found in farmer’s markets and shops – ‘look for a rich and vivid colour and avoid any signs of wilting,’ Bettina advises. And how to cook with it? ‘Treat as a more aromatic version of the leafier spinach and wilt down and drape over artisan baked pizza bases, whizz into a homemade pesto to stir through pasta or risotto, or add to breadcrumbs to top fish before baking.’ This simple pasta recipe will go down a treat.
Decorate The Table For Spring
Is there anything better than a fabulous dinner party with the sun shining, the windows flung open and a table set to bursting with crockery, trinkets and delicious food? We think not. But how to make your tablescape stand out? ‘I often reach for favourite pieces that set a playful tone without focusing too heavily on everything being matching and “perfect”,’ says homeware designer Rebecca Udall. ‘Understated yet beautiful linens crafted from the finest materials – I love a modern take on a classic stripe, or to embrace seasonality with a favourite botanical inspired print. Rattan lends itself perfectly to the season, adding texture without feeling heavy. And adding fresh blooms – narcissus and tulips are a favourite for a pop of bright colour – creates the perfect spring mood.’ Find more expert tips for spring tablescaping with our guide here.
Rebecca Udall
Cook With Asparagus
The British asparagus season runs from 23 April (St George’s Day), until the summer solstice in June, so you just have a couple of months to make the most of it. It’s the ultimate spring vegetable, delicious grilled, steamed, stir-fried or roasted – and works well both as a central ingredient in risotto, soups and pasta dishes as well as served as a side dish. But how are the chefs cooking it? Ben Tish (Cubitt House) loves to BBQ asparagus ‘so that it retains bite and goes all peppery’. He also likes to slowly cook the stems in the foaming butter with shallots and capers – ‘really delicious’. Here are some more asparagus recipe ideas.
