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

Published: 25 August 2026

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. Wednesday 26 August 2026 runs 23 programmes through the day, and the evening splits between archive telly and film: a 1950 Frank Launder comedy holds the last stretch of the afternoon and the first quarter of the 6pm hour, three archive strands then carry the channel to primetime, and a 1966 le Carré adaptation gives way to a 1962 thriller either side of 11pm. Full breakdown below.

Talking Pictures TV Schedule: Wednesday 26 August 2026 (Full Listings)

Here is the complete Talking Pictures TV schedule for Wednesday 26 August 2026, on Freeview 82.

Overnight

Breakfast

Morning

Afternoon

Early evening

Primetime

Late night

What’s on Talking Pictures TV today

Wednesday’s overnight stretch opens at 1:35am with The Long Haul, followed by the five-minute archive short Cinebox Memories at 3:20am. Two archive series carry things towards breakfast: Scotland Yard (3:25am, series 1, episode 9) and Target: The Corruptors (4am, series 1, episode 33), before The Man from U.N.C.L.E takes the 5am slot (series 1, episode 7).

Once In a New Moon opens the day proper at 6am, followed by Inner Sanctum at 7:15am and Autobiography of a Princess from 8:30am.

Carry On Admiral fills the late-morning slot from 9:45am, then Blind Corner runs from 11:25am into the early afternoon.

The Buccaneers continues its run at 1pm (series 1, episode 24), ahead of Doctor in Trouble from 1:30pm. The short Look At Life: Shopping for a Queen fills 3:15pm, Dial 999 takes the 3:30pm slot (series 1, episode 32), a That’s My Boy episode follows at 4pm (series 1, episode 3), and The Happiest Days of Your Life, the channel’s main afternoon film, takes over from 4:35pm and runs to 6:15pm, holding the first quarter of the 6pm hour before the schedule turns to archive telly.

Talking Pictures TV tonight — primetime and the evening schedule

Here’s the Talking Pictures TV primetime line-up for tonight, Wednesday 26 August 2026.

The Last day of Trolley Bus 666 Edgware – Glimpses — Talking Pictures TV, 6:15pm

A quarter-hour of archive footage marking the end of the line for Edgware’s 666 trolleybus route bridges the gap between the afternoon film and the evening’s game show.

Give Us A Clue — Talking Pictures TV, 6:30pm

Give Us A Clue continues its archive run at 6:30pm (series 1, episode 17), the ITV charades format that had teams miming their way through film, book and play titles for the best part of 15 years.

Out of Town — Talking Pictures TV, 7pm

Out of Town takes the 7pm slot (series 1, episode 41), Jack Hargreaves’ unhurried look at rural life and country pursuits, presented from his shed-set studio for Southern Television from 1960 into the early 1980s.

Scotland Yard — Talking Pictures TV, 7:30pm

Scotland Yard returns for a second helping at 7:30pm (series 1, episode 10), one of the half-hour featurettes Anglo-Amalgamated made as cinema support pictures through the 1950s, each dramatising a closed Metropolitan Police case and introduced by Edgar Lustgarten.

Van der Valk — Talking Pictures TV, 8:05pm

Van der Valk opens its archive run at 8:05pm (series 1, episode 1). Barry Foster plays the Amsterdam detective in the Thames Television series adapted from Nicolas Freeling’s novels, which ran on ITV from 1972 to 1992.

The Deadly Affair — Talking Pictures TV, 9:05pm

The Deadly Affair takes the 9:05pm slot and runs to 11:15pm. Sidney Lumet’s 1966 adaptation of John le Carré’s Call for the Dead casts James Mason as a Foreign Office investigator picking apart a colleague’s supposed suicide, with Simone Signoret as the dead man’s widow.

Hands of a Stranger — Talking Pictures TV, 11:15pm

Hands of a Stranger closes the night at 11:15pm. Newt Arnold’s 1962 thriller, an unofficial reworking of The Hands of Orlac, follows a concert pianist whose hands are rebuilt after a car crash using a transplant taken from a murder victim, with unsettling results.

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?

The Happiest Days of Your Life, Frank Launder’s 1950 comedy with Alastair Sim and Margaret Rutherford, opens the evening from 4:35pm and holds the schedule to 6:15pm. A quarter-hour trolleybus archive short bridges into Give Us A Clue at 6:30pm, then Out of Town, Scotland Yard and Van der Valk carry the evening through to 9pm. The Deadly Affair, Sidney Lumet’s 1966 le Carré adaptation with James Mason and Simone Signoret, runs from 9:05pm to 11:15pm, and the night closes with Hands of a Stranger, Newt Arnold’s 1962 thriller.

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 Deadly Affair is the one to catch tonight, from 9:05pm. Sidney Lumet’s take on le Carré gives James Mason one of his best later roles, and the two-hour-plus slot leaves the plot room to unfold properly rather than being trimmed to fit a single-film hour. The Happiest Days of Your Life earlier in the afternoon is the stronger pick if comedy is what you’re after, and Van der Valk at 8:05pm gives the night a slice of 1970s British television before the film takes over.

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