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. Sunday 16 August 2026 closes with three films back to back: the 2000 television version of The Railway Children at 6pm, Hammer’s The Quatermass Xperiment at 8:05pm, and the 1976 comedy Confessions of a Driving Instructor at 9:45pm, before Mike Read’s chart show takes the schedule past midnight. Full breakdown below.

Talking Pictures TV Schedule: Sunday 16 August 2026 (Full Listings)

Here is the complete Talking Pictures TV schedule for Sunday 16 August 2026, on Freeview 82.

Overnight

Breakfast

Morning

Afternoon

Early evening

Primetime

Late night

What’s on Talking Pictures TV today

Sunday’s overnight run opens at 12:20am with a rerun of Fortean TV, the archive strand built around unexplained sightings and inexplicable footage, followed at 12:55am by an episode of One Step Beyond, John Newland’s late-1950s supernatural anthology. Take Me Naked, a 1966 American underground curiosity from Michael and Roberta Findlay, fills 1:30am, ahead of Snowbeast at 2:55am, a 1977 US television chiller about a creature stalking a Colorado ski resort. Jack Clayton’s The Bespoke Overcoat, the 1955 short that won an Oscar for its adaptation of Gogol’s ghost story, plays at 4:40am, and a short run of vintage jukebox clips, Cinebox Memories, bridges the gap to Honey West at 5:30am, the mid-1960s detective series with Anne Francis as one of American television’s first female private eyes.

The 1979 backwoods drama Up River opens the day proper at 6am, a young man’s attempt to build a life in early twentieth-century British Columbia meeting nothing but hostility from the locals he encounters. A short archive item, The Great Holdup 1955, runs at 7:45am, before The Lucy Show at 8am, Lucille Ball’s sitcom follow-up to I Love Lucy. My Outlaw Brother closes out breakfast at 8:30am, a 1951 Mickey Rooney western about a young man tracking down his fugitive brother in Mexico.

X The Unknown takes the mid-morning slot at 10:10am, Hammer’s 1956 feature about a radioactive mud creature terrorising a Scottish village years before the studio turned its attention to Quatermass and Dracula. Batman follows at 11:45am, one more instalment from the daily run of the mid-1960s Adam West series.

A Hole Lot of Trouble opens the afternoon at 12:15pm, Francis Searle’s 1971 comedy short about three council workmen digging in entirely the wrong spot. North West Frontier follows at 12:50pm, Kenneth More and Lauren Bacall’s 1959 adventure about a scratch crew evacuating a young prince by train during an uprising in colonial India, one of the day’s longer films at two and a half hours. New Seekers Keep Britain Tidy 1973, a short anti-litter film built around the pop group, runs at 3:25pm, then For the Love of Ada at 3:30pm, the 1970s sitcom pairing Wilfred Pickles and Irene Handl as a gravedigger and his elderly sweetheart. The Man from U.N.C.L.E, the 1960s spy series starring Robert Vaughn and David McCallum, closes the afternoon at 4pm.

The Footage Detectives takes 5pm, Mike Read joining channel founder Noel Cronin on the hunt for lost reels turned up in lofts and garages, before tonight’s run of films begins.

Talking Pictures TV tonight — primetime and the evening schedule

Here’s the Talking Pictures TV primetime line-up for tonight, Sunday 16 August 2026.

The Railway Children — Talking Pictures TV, 6pm

Evening films open with the 2000 television adaptation of E. Nesbit’s novel, not the better-known 1970 cinema version. Jenny Agutter switches sides here, playing the mother rather than Roberta, the role she took thirty years earlier, and Richard Attenborough appears as the old gentleman on the branch line. The bones of the story stay the same: a father wrongly imprisoned, a family exiled to a Yorkshire cottage, and three children who adopt a passing railway as their unlikely source of comfort.

The Quatermass Xperiment — Talking Pictures TV, 8:05pm

Hammer’s 1955 breakthrough follows, Brian Donlevy’s rocket scientist racing to work out what happened to two of the three astronauts aboard a spacecraft that limps back to Earth missing most of its crew. The survivor, Victor Carroon, comes home altered, and the studio’s reputation for horror effectively starts here, years before Dracula or the Frankenstein pictures.

Confessions of a Driving Instructor — Talking Pictures TV, 9:45pm

Robin Askwith’s Timothy Lea gets behind the wheel next, teaming up with his brother-in-law Sid Noggett, played by Anthony Booth, to run a driving school as their latest scheme. It’s the third of the four Confessions films, broad seventies farce with no ambitions beyond being exactly that.

The Heritage Chart Show with Mike Read — Talking Pictures TV, 11:30pm

Mike Read closes the night at 11:30pm with another edition of his chart rundown, mixing archive performance clips with studio segments recorded for the show. Series one is now well past its 230th outing.

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?

Three archive films run back to back: the 2000 television version of The Railway Children, with Jenny Agutter and Richard Attenborough, at 6pm; Hammer’s The Quatermass Xperiment (1955) at 8:05pm; and the 1976 comedy Confessions of a Driving Instructor at 9:45pm. The Heritage Chart Show with Mike Read closes the night at 11:30pm.

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.

The Quatermass Xperiment is the one to catch tonight, at 8:05pm. Val Guest’s black-and-white chiller carries a nervous, post-war unease that most fifties monster movies never manage, and it’s the film that pushed Hammer toward horror as a going concern rather than a sideline. The 6pm slot is worth a look too: the 2000 Railway Children doesn’t erase the 1970 original, but Jenny Agutter moving from Roberta to the mother’s role a generation on is a nice piece of casting, and it tells the story straight rather than chasing nostalgia for its own sake.

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