Describe a television programme you like
Series give you more material than films — format, running length, how it changed over time.
The cue card
Describe a television programme you like.
You should say
- what kind of programme it is
- how often you watch it
- what it is about
- and explain why you like it
1 minute to prepare · up to 2 minutes to speak
How to fill the two minutes
Four beats, not four answers. The prompts on the card are a scaffold — a turn that flows past them scores better than four disconnected replies.
- What kind of programme and how long it's been running.
- The format: how an episode is built, how long, how many.
- What it's about and what makes it different from others like it.
- How you watch it — weekly, in stretches, alone or with someone.
Vocabulary this card invites
Lexical Resource is a quarter of your band, and band 7 explicitly allows the occasional wrong word — playing it safe with plain vocabulary is what keeps people at 6.
an episode
and 'a series' — get the countable vocabulary right
binge-watch
current, natural, and precisely descriptive
the plot thickens
idiomatic for developing complexity
it's gone downhill
for a series that declined — an honest opinion
a cliffhanger
the exact term for an unresolved ending
must-see
for something you arrange your evening around
The trap on this card
Recapping episodes.
Describe the show, not what happened in it. Format, tone, what it does well — those are all describable without a single plot point.
A band 8 answer, and why it works
Read this to see the moves, not to learn the words. An examiner hears memorised answers every working day and it shows up in your fluency score — the hesitation pattern of someone reciting is nothing like the pattern of someone thinking. The details below are invented; yours should be your own.
The programme I'd describe is a documentary series about deep-sea life that I watched over about a fortnight last year, mostly because I couldn't sleep. Each episode covers a different depth, which is a simple structure and unexpectedly effective — you descend as the series goes on and things get progressively stranger. What I liked about it is that it resisted the temptation to make everything about how amazing nature is. There's a lot of that in the genre and it starts to feel like being shouted at. This one was quieter. There's a long sequence in the fourth episode of a creature doing essentially nothing for several minutes and it was more compelling than anything with a chase in it. I've since been unable to stop mentioning it to people. I'd say I've recommended it about a dozen times and I've no idea whether anyone has watched it. Probably not. People rarely act on recommendations, which doesn't stop any of us making them.
What earns the band
- The critique of the genre's usual tone gives the answer a point of view rather than a summary.
- Choosing the least eventful sequence as the best one is a counterintuitive judgement and reads as genuinely personal.
- The wry ending about recommendations generalises lightly and closes on a natural, conversational note.
What Part 3 asks next
Part 3 is loosely tied to your long turn, but the questions turn abstract — about people in general rather than about you. This card usually leads into:
- whether television still brings families together
- how advertising shapes what gets made
- the effect of screen time on children
Other media & culture cards
Describe a film you enjoyed watching.
Same discipline as the book card — plot summary is the trap, response is the answer.
Describe a song or piece of music you like.
Music is hard to describe and that's the opportunity — most candidates give up and talk about the artist instead.
Describe a website you use often.
Pick one with a purpose. 'Google' and 'YouTube' are the answers that give you least to say.
Describe an interesting piece of news you read or heard about.
Choose something you actually understood. A story you half-followed will strand you at ninety seconds.
Describe a podcast or radio programme you listen to.
An audio card, which means the when matters more than for any other media topic — listening is something you do while doing something else.
Speak this one out loud
Oliver will read you a card, wait out your preparation minute, and then say nothing at all for two minutes — which is the part you cannot rehearse alone. The report afterwards scores fluency, vocabulary, grammar and pronunciation separately. The first test is free.
This guide is written from the published IELTS Speaking band descriptors, in our own words. For the official wording, see the British Council's band descriptors. MockLive AI is an independent practice tool and is not affiliated with IELTS, the British Council, IDP or Cambridge University Press & Assessment.