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. Friday 14 August 2026 keeps to the channel’s usual weekday shape: archive serials and features through the day, then Caroline Munro’s Cellar Club leads into a horror double bill from 10:20pm, Curt Siodmak’s Tales of Frankenstein followed by the 1940 Bela Lugosi picture The Devil Bat.

Talking Pictures TV Schedule: Friday 14 August 2026 (Full Listings)

Here is the complete Talking Pictures TV schedule for Friday 14 August 2026, on Freeview 82.

Overnight

Breakfast

Morning

Afternoon

Early evening

Primetime

Late night

What’s on Talking Pictures TV today

Friday’s overnight run opens with Leslie Norman’s 1956 fantasy X The Unknown at 1:05am, Dean Jagger investigating a radioactive creature terrorising a Scottish village, with Leo McKern in support. Colonel March Investigates follows at 2:40am, Boris Karloff running Scotland Yard’s Department of Queer Complaints through a trio of odd cases. A 1964 instalment of Burke’s Law rides in at 4am (series 2, episode 1), Gene Barry’s detective looking into the death of a beach queen mid-surf, before Film Noir’s look back at the genre continues at 5am (series 1, episode 3).

Frank Marshall’s 1960 war drama Identity Unknown takes the 6am hour, Richard Wyler and Pauline Yates playing reporters drawn together while investigating an aircraft accident. Nathan Juran’s 1964 adventure East of Sudan sends Anthony Quayle and Sylvia Syms into 19th-century Africa to rescue a governess and her charge from 7:20am, and Compton Bennett’s 1960 drama Beyond the Curtain follows at 9:10am, Richard Greene and Eva Bartok’s East German refugee forced back home when her flight is grounded.

The 1968 short Litter Defence Volunteers with Roy Hudd looks at efforts to keep the streets clean from 10:55am, ahead of a 1967 episode of The Lucy Show at 11am (series 6, episode 7), Lucille Ball roped into posing as an elderly woman to escort a bank president to a dinner. The 1953 crime drama The Broken Horseshoe takes 11:30am, Robert Beatty’s doctor implicated after a hit-and-run victim he treated is later murdered, before an Edgar Wallace Mystery Theatre instalment from 1964 closes the lunchtime run at 1:05pm (series 5, episode 5), a deported racketeer coming home to a murder charge.

A 1956 episode of The Adventures of Robin Hood airs at 2:15pm (series 1, episode 23), Richard Greene’s outlaw racing to save Arthur of Tetsbury from a forced levy. Brandy for the Parson, a 1951 comedy, follows at 2:45pm, Kenneth More and Charles Hawtrey’s boating holiday off the Kent coast derailed by a smuggling ring. Look At Life Under the Hammer takes a short look at the world of auctions from 4:20pm, before a 1961 episode of The Cheaters at 4:30pm (series 1, episode 24) and A Family At War at 5pm (series 2, episode 2) round out the afternoon.

Talking Pictures TV tonight — primetime and the evening schedule

Here’s the Talking Pictures TV primetime line-up for tonight, Friday 14 August 2026.

Rumpole of the Bailey — Talking Pictures TV, 6pm

Leo McKern’s rumpled barrister takes on a drugs case in ‘Rumpole and the Alternative Society’, one of the sharper episodes from the show’s first run. Jane Asher and Nigel Gregory feature among the guest cast, and the case doesn’t resolve the way Rumpole hoped.

Z-Cars — Talking Pictures TV, 7pm

‘Inside Job’ finds Detective Barlow, played by Stratford Johns, picking apart a mail van robbery that looked straightforward at first. The getaway was clean and an arrest followed quickly, which is usually the point where Barlow starts asking harder questions. The episode dates from 1964.

Public Eye — Talking Pictures TV, 8pm

Alfred Burke’s private investigator Frank Marker is hired to track down a missing woman, Janice Summers, and bring her home in this 1972 episode, ‘Girl In Blue’. Ray Smith and Richard Leech round out the cast.

Cellar Club with Caroline Munro — Talking Pictures TV, 9:05pm

Caroline Munro opens tonight’s horror slot with a short introduction to the evening’s episode of Supernatural, the 1970s anthology series that follows.

Supernatural — Talking Pictures TV, 9:10pm

‘Night of the Marionettes’ sends a literary critic to the house where Frankenstein was supposedly written, and the visit raises the question of how much of the original story was ever fiction. Gordon Jackson and Kathleen Byron head a cast more associated with straight drama than horror.

Cellar Club with Caroline Munro — Talking Pictures TV, 10:10pm

Munro returns to set up the night’s double bill, a quick word on Tales of Frankenstein and The Devil Bat before both films run back to back.

Tales of Frankenstein — Talking Pictures TV, 10:20pm

Curt Siodmak directs this 1958 curio, in which Anton Diffring’s Dr Frankenstein finds his creation won’t respond and has to rethink the whole experiment. It was shot as a pilot for a series that was never picked up.

The Devil Bat — Talking Pictures TV, 10:55pm

Bela Lugosi plays a scientist with a grudge and a bottle of rigged aftershave, engineering a string of fatal bat attacks on anyone unlucky enough to wear it. Jean Yarbrough directs, and the whole picture runs under 70 minutes.

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?

Archive drama fills early evening, with Rumpole of the Bailey at 6pm, Z-Cars at 7pm and Public Eye at 8pm. Caroline Munro’s Cellar Club opens the horror strand at 9:05pm ahead of Supernatural at 9:10pm, then returns at 10:10pm to introduce the night’s double bill: Tales of Frankenstein at 10:20pm and The Devil Bat at 10:55pm.

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.

Tales of Frankenstein and The Devil Bat are the pair to catch tonight, either side of Caroline Munro’s 10:10pm Cellar Club introduction. Neither is a lost classic. Curt Siodmak’s Frankenstein entry is thin, low-budget stuff, and Bela Lugosi’s Devil Bat is B-picture nonsense built around a killer aftershave, but that’s rather the point of the slot. The stronger reason to tune in comes earlier: Rumpole of the Bailey, Z-Cars and Public Eye run back to back from 6pm, three decades-old series that still hold up as proper drama.

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