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. Tuesday 18 August 2026 runs archive series into film rather than a straight triple bill: Whiplash’s outback stagecoach outfit hits trouble at 6:25pm, Solo and Kuryakin work a discotheque front at 6:55pm in The Man from U.N.C.L.E, and Anthony Mann’s 1968 spy thriller A Dandy in Aspic, with Laurence Harvey as a double agent hunting himself, closes primetime at 9pm. Full breakdown below.

Talking Pictures TV Schedule: Tuesday 18 August 2026 (Full Listings)

Here is the complete Talking Pictures TV schedule for Tuesday 18 August 2026, on Freeview 82.

Overnight

Breakfast

Morning

Afternoon

Early evening

Primetime

Late night

What’s on Talking Pictures TV today

Tuesday’s overnight run opens at 12:25am with a noir-tinged crime drama, Breathless, before The Killings At Outpost Zeta at 2:15am, a 1980 American science-fiction chiller about a team sent to find out what wiped out two earlier expeditions to a remote, barren world. Le Mans Car Racing 1956 fills a short slot at 4:05am with vintage motorsport footage, ahead of The Veil at 4:25am, an episode of Boris Karloff’s ill-fated 1958 anthology series, made to dramatise supposedly true accounts of the unexplained but shelved by its studio and never broadcast in its own era. The Man from U.N.C.L.E closes the overnight run at 5am with its very first outing, Robert Vaughn and David McCallum still finding their feet as Napoleon Solo and Illya Kuryakin.

Breakfast opens at 6am with To Have And To Hold, an old British drama, followed at 7:15am by Now Barabbas Was a Robber, Gordon Parry’s 1949 prison picture with Richard Greene and Cedric Hardwicke top-billed, and Kathleen Harrison, William Hartnell, Kenneth More and a young Richard Burton, in one of his earliest screen roles, further down the cast list.

The Love Match takes 9am, Arthur Askey’s 1955 comedy about a football-mad train driver trying to win back money he’s raided from the railwaymen’s holiday fund. The Strange Love of Martha Ivers follows at 10:45am, Lewis Milestone’s 1946 noir with Barbara Stanwyck and Van Heflin carrying a shared secret from childhood, and Kirk Douglas making his screen debut alongside them.

The afternoon opens with William Tell at 1pm, series one deep into its run by episode 23, before Green For Danger at 1:35pm, Sidney Gilliat’s 1946 hospital-set mystery with Alastair Sim’s Inspector Cockrill picking through a death on the operating table, Trevor Howard and Sally Gray among the suspects. What’s On TPTV With Noel gives channel founder Noel Cronin his own slot at 3:25pm, ahead of The Bespoke Overcoat at 3:35pm, Jack Clayton’s Oscar-winning 1955 short with David Kossoff and Alfie Bass. The Gentle Sex closes the afternoon at 4:20pm, Leslie Howard’s 1943 account of women recruited into the wartime ATS, directed and narrated by Howard himself in the last film he made before his death that year.

Early evening belongs to Look At Life Against the Clock at 6:10pm, before Whiplash at 6:25pm and The Man from U.N.C.L.E at 6:55pm, both archive series, run in ahead of tonight’s evening drama and film.

Talking Pictures TV tonight — primetime and the evening schedule

Here’s the Talking Pictures TV primetime line-up for tonight, Tuesday 18 August 2026.

Look At Life Against the Clock — Talking Pictures TV, 6:10pm

Look At Life Against the Clock opens the evening with one of the Rank Organisation’s short cinema newsreels, this instalment turning its attention to the world of car rallying.

Whiplash — Talking Pictures TV, 6:25pm

Whiplash (series 1, episode 34) is the 1960-61 Australian-made western built around Christopher Cobb, Peter Graves’ American who brought the stagecoach business to the goldfields. Tonight’s episode has a magistrate pulling Cobb’s franchise after a kidnapping threatens his niece.

The Man from U.N.C.L.E — Talking Pictures TV, 6:55pm

Solo and Kuryakin go undercover at a nightclub in The Man from U.N.C.L.E‘s “The Discotheque Affair” (series 2, episode 5), tracking a THRUSH listening device planted close to Mr Waverly’s office.

Buccaneer — Talking Pictures TV, 7:55pm

Buccaneer (series 1, episode 5) puts Burton’s shipping business under suspicion, with Tony stumbling onto something unwelcome mid-flight to Africa. A minor entry in the channel’s run of 1980 adventure serials, but a reliable one.

A Dandy in Aspic — Talking Pictures TV, 9pm

Anthony Mann’s final film, A Dandy in Aspic (1968), gives the night its centrepiece. Laurence Harvey plays a British agent ordered to eliminate a Soviet mole, unaware that he himself is the man he’s meant to kill, with Mia Farrow and Tom Courtenay circling the fallout. Mann died partway through the shoot, and Harvey took over directing duties to finish it, which may explain why the film feels colder and more detached than the espionage thrillers it’s often filed alongside.

Fortean TV — Talking Pictures TV, 11:10pm

Reverend Lionel Fanthorpe presides over Fortean TV (series 1, episode 12), a late-1990s rummage through the weeping-Elvis phenomenon, an Italian stigmatic case and an attempt to bring a centuries-old bird back to life.

Legend Of The Witches — Talking Pictures TV, 11:45pm

Legend Of The Witches (1970) closes the night, a solemn documentary tour of British witchcraft and the supernatural that takes in interviews with the country’s self-styled former Chief of Witches.

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 series lead into the film tonight: Whiplash at 6:25pm (series 1, episode 34) and The Man from U.N.C.L.E at 6:55pm (series 2, episode 5), followed by Buccaneer at 7:55pm (series 1, episode 5) and Anthony Mann’s 1968 Cold War thriller A Dandy in Aspic at 9pm, starring Laurence Harvey and Mia Farrow.

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.

A Dandy in Aspic is the one to catch tonight, at 9pm. Anthony Mann built his name on westerns and war pictures, and his final film swaps those wide-open spaces for a much colder, more claustrophobic Cold War Berlin; Laurence Harvey’s double agent is a genuinely unsettling piece of casting, a man ordered to hunt himself. The Man from U.N.C.L.E at 6:55pm is worth staying in for as well: “The Discotheque Affair” is the kind of Robert Vaughn and David McCallum outing that made the series a Monday-to-Friday afternoon staple for a generation, and it hasn’t dated as badly as some of its rivals.

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