Talking Pictures TV TV Guide: Listings, Schedule & What’s On Talking Pictures TV Tonight

Talking Pictures TV is the independent, family-run channel built almost entirely on one man’s private film collection. Noel Cronin spent decades buying up the rights to older British and Hollywood titles through his company Renown Pictures, and in May 2015 he and his daughter, Sarah Cronin-Stanley, turned that archive into a television channel. Eleven years on, nobody else on British free-to-air is attempting anything like it. Saturday 29 August 2026 runs 28 programmes through the day, working through American import series and archive adventure serials before a pair of vintage war films sees the afternoon out, Sea of Sand among them, running right up to 6:10pm. A short newsreel item then hands over to home-grown drama, Dick Turpin, Maigret and The Duchess of Duke Street among them, before Quatermass 2, Val Guest’s 1957 Hammer sequel, takes the 9:05pm slot. George Romero’s Night Of The Living Dead closes the schedule. Full breakdown below.

Talking Pictures TV Schedule: Saturday 29 August 2026 (Full Listings)

Here is the complete Talking Pictures TV schedule for Saturday 29 August 2026, on Freeview 82.

Overnight

Breakfast

Morning

Afternoon

Early evening

Primetime

Late night

What’s on Talking Pictures TV today

Saturday’s schedule opens at midnight with Remember My Name, running two hours into the small hours, followed by A Cry From The Streets at 2am. Two archive crime series close out the overnight run: Scotland Yard at 3:55am (series 1, episode 11), the strand that reconstructed real Metropolitan Police cases for cinema audiences in the 1950s, and The Vise at 4:30am (series 1, episode 16), an Anglo-American insurance-investigator series later retitled Saber of London for its UK run. The American import The Man from U.N.C.L.E takes the 5am slot (series 1, episode 10), a full decade before satellite channels made US imports routine on British television.

Breakfast brings a scattering of short archive items, Singing Through at 6am, Bring on Bing at 7:05am and the game show Runaround at 7:20am, before the morning turns to serial adventure. Legend of the Hidden City airs at 7:50am (series 1, episode 28), and William Tell follows at 8:25am (series 1, episode 9), Conrad Phillips’ ITC swashbuckler from the late 1950s. Batman brings the Adam West era to the schedule at 9am (series 3, episode 24), and Hawkeye & the Last of the Mohicans, a 1950s Canadian series built around Fenimore Cooper’s frontier scout, takes 9:30am (series 1, episode 18). Gerry Anderson’s puppet shows follow back to back: Captain Scarlet and the Mysterons at 10am (series 1, episode 27) and Supercar at 10:30am (series 1, episode 7). The Buccaneers, with Robert Shaw’s swashbuckling turn as Dan Tempest, airs at 11am (series 1, episode 38), and The Adventures of Robin Hood, starring Richard Greene in the title role, closes the morning at 11:30am (series 2, episode 20).

The afternoon belongs to two vintage pictures either side of a run of shorter items. The Abominable Snowman opens at noon and runs an hour and three quarters, Val Guest’s 1957 Hammer horror sending Peter Cushing and Forrest Tucker up the Himalayas after a Yeti. Albert R.N. follows at 1:45pm, Lewis Gilbert’s 1953 prisoner-of-war drama built around a dummy used to cover an escaping officer’s absence at roll call. A short music item, The Tornados ‘Robot’, fills five minutes at 3:30pm, then Whiplash at 3:35pm (series 1, episode 11) sends Peter Graves’ American frontiersman off to introduce the stagecoach to colonial Australia. Sea of Sand, Guy Green’s 1958 Long Range Desert Group drama with Richard Attenborough among its patrol of officers, closes out the afternoon from 4:10pm and runs two hours, past 6pm and up to 6:10pm, when the evening’s first item, Look At Life: Eagle’s Nest, takes over.

Talking Pictures TV tonight — primetime and the evening schedule

Here’s the Talking Pictures TV primetime line-up for tonight, Saturday 29 August 2026.

Look At Life Eagle’s Nest — Talking Pictures TV, 6:10pm

Sea of Sand, the desert war film that has held the schedule since 4:10pm, runs right up to this point, so the evening effectively starts here rather than at a clean 6pm. Eagle’s Nest is a quarter-hour of Rank’s old cinema newsreel series, repurposed decades on as a bridge between the afternoon film and tonight’s run of drama.

Dick Turpin — Talking Pictures TV, 6:25pm

Richard O’Sullivan trades sitcom roles for a highwayman’s cloak in The Jail-Birds (series 1, episode 13). The 1979-82 ITV series treated its real-life source loosely, playing Turpin as a swashbuckling folk hero rather than the horse thief the history books describe.

Maigret — Talking Pictures TV, 7pm

On Holiday (series 1, episode 10) sends Rupert Davies’ Georges Simenon detective on a break that doesn’t go to plan: his wife ends up in hospital, and Maigret fills the waiting hours by working a case that lands in his lap regardless. Shot in black and white between 1960 and 1963, this BBC series is the sort of patient, dialogue-heavy procedural British television rarely attempts now.

The Duchess of Duke Street — Talking Pictures TV, 8pm

Tea and a Wad (series 2, episode 9) continues Gemma Jones’ run as Louisa Trotter, the former scullery maid who claws her way to owning London’s Hotel Bentinck in this Edwardian-set BBC drama. Half a century after its original run, it remains one of the more purely enjoyable class-and-ambition dramas the BBC made in the 1970s.

Quatermass 2 — Talking Pictures TV, 9:05pm

Val Guest’s 1957 Hammer sequel puts Brian Donlevy’s Professor Quatermass up against a government facility that has quietly been taken over from within, with John Longden playing the detective drawn into investigating it. It moves faster and pulpier than the original Quatermass Xperiment, and its vision of an ordinary industrial site hiding something monstrous still holds up.

EuroTrash — Talking Pictures TV, 10:50pm

Late-night filler from Channel 4’s mischievous 1990s strand, fronted for much of its run by Antoine de Caunes, built around whatever outrageous clips of continental broadcasting its producers could lay their hands on.

Night Of The Living Dead — Talking Pictures TV, 11:25pm

George A. Romero’s 1968 zombie picture closes out the night, shot in black and white on a budget so tight the cast is largely unknown. Duane Jones leads as the film’s most level-headed survivor, with Judith O’Dea playing the shell-shocked Barbra opposite him. It fell into the public domain almost by accident and went on to define the modern zombie film more or less on its own.

What kind of films and shows are on Talking Pictures TV

Vintage British and Hollywood films

The backbone of the schedule is the Renown Pictures library: British films from the 1930s to the 1970s, plus war pictures, adventure films and the odd Hollywood title bought in to fill a gap. Quality swings wildly from one afternoon to the next, which is part of the deal.

Archive TV drama and detective series

Early evenings lean on serialised drama from the 1950s through the 1980s: Z Cars, Public Eye, Hannay and others of that stripe. Much of it isn’t shown anywhere else on British television, and some of it hadn’t been shown anywhere at all for thirty-odd years before this channel dug it out. If you want to know why people are fond of Talking Pictures TV rather than merely tolerant of it, this is the part of the schedule to point at.

Cult strands, B-movies and magazine shows

Late nights get stranger: horror and cult titles through Caroline Munro’s Cellar Club, oddities like Supernatural, imported curios.

How to watch Talking Pictures TV

Channel numbers

Here’s where to find Talking Pictures TV across the main UK television platforms:

Talking Pictures TV is free on all of the above platforms, with no subscription required. It doesn’t run a +1 timeshift channel, so these are the only live feeds available.

TPTV Encore catch-up

TPTV Encore is the channel’s own free streaming service, launched in December 2021 and run through a browser at tptvencore.co.uk, with an app on Android. Register an email address and recent broadcasts are usually there for about a week.

The better reason to bother with it is what sits behind the catch-up: a deep archive that includes Southern Television material never given a regular slot on the main channel. Those older titles stay free after the catch-up window shuts, but they carry adverts.

Frequently asked questions

What’s on Talking Pictures TV tonight?

Tonight’s evening is archive drama into a pair of classic films: Dick Turpin at 6:25pm, Maigret at 7pm and The Duchess of Duke Street at 8pm, before Quatermass 2, Val Guest’s 1957 Hammer sequel with Brian Donlevy, takes the 9:05pm slot. Night Of The Living Dead, George Romero’s 1968 zombie picture, closes the schedule from 11:25pm. Check the schedule table above for the full day’s listings.

What channel is Talking Pictures TV on?

Freeview 82, Sky 324, Virgin Media 445 and Freesat 306. It’s also on Freely at channel 36. All are free to watch.

Does Talking Pictures TV have a +1 channel?

No. TPTV Encore stands in for a +1 service, with recent broadcasts available to catch up on demand instead.

Is Talking Pictures TV free to watch?

Yes, entirely. It’s advertising-funded rather than subscription-funded, on the live channel and on TPTV Encore alike.

Verdict

I rate Talking Pictures TV highly for exactly what it is: a small independent operation that still does something none of the bigger channels bother with. Old films and archive television get a proper home here instead of the odd graveyard slot. It won’t be for everyone, and some evenings the schedule reads like a lucky dip. That’s also the appeal.

Quatermass 2 is the one to catch tonight, from 9:05pm. Val Guest’s sequel moves rougher and faster than the original Quatermass Xperiment, and Brian Donlevy’s bullish, very American professor still cuts an odd, effective figure investigating a very English cover-up. The Duchess of Duke Street at 8pm is the pick if a gentler hour suits better, Gemma Jones’ Louisa Trotter running her hotel with the same mix of warmth and steel that carried the series through two full runs on the BBC.

Related: Film4 TV Guide | Freeview Channel Guide | Films on TV This Week