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

Published: 5 September 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. Sunday 6 September 2026 runs 20 programmes through the day, opening on archive serials and older features before daytime settles into more of the same. The evening is a straight run of features rather than a themed double bill: the 1958 Titanic drama A Night to Remember takes the early slot from 6pm, then the archive crime series Dial 999 and the 1974 comedy Confessions of a Window Cleaner carry primetime, before Mike Read’s chart nostalgia strand and the Chet Baker documentary Let’s Get Lost close out the night. Full breakdown below.

Talking Pictures TV Schedule: Sunday 6 September 2026 (Full Listings)

Here is the complete Talking Pictures TV schedule for Sunday 6 September 2026, on Freeview 82.

Overnight

Breakfast

Morning

Afternoon

Early evening

Primetime

Late night

What’s on Talking Pictures TV today

Sunday opens with White Cargo at 12:50am, a 1942 MGM colonial melodrama, then King Rat from 2:20am, the 1965 prisoner-of-war drama with George Segal as the American GI who builds a black-market empire inside a Japanese camp, trading with the guards to keep himself and, almost as a side effect, James Fox’s ailing British officer alive. Two archive series carry the small hours towards dawn: One Step Beyond at 4:55am and Honey West at 5:30am.

The 1959 B-movie The Giant Gila Monster opens breakfast at 6am, then The Lucy Show and Sherlock Holmes run through to Powderkeg at 8:35am. The Flying Deuces, a 1939 Laurel and Hardy comedy set in the French Foreign Legion, follows at 10:30am, then Batman’s mid-morning slot at 11:50am leads into Two Way Stretch, the 1960 prison comedy built around Peter Sellers plotting one last job from inside his cell.

The afternoon holds Cover Girl Killer at 2:10pm, a 1959 thriller about a killer targeting pin-up models for a girlie magazine, with Harry H. Corbett among the cast. For the Love of Ada and The Man from U.N.C.L.E carry things towards early evening, The Footage Detectives, the channel’s own archive-clips strand, takes 5pm, and A Night to Remember opens primetime at 6pm — see below.

Talking Pictures TV tonight — primetime and the evening schedule

Here’s the Talking Pictures TV primetime line-up for tonight, Sunday 6 September 2026.

A Night To Remember — Talking Pictures TV, 6pm

The 1958 telling of the Titanic’s sinking, and still the version most historians point to first. Roy Ward Baker built it from Walter Lord’s account of the night rather than any romantic subplot, with Kenneth More’s Second Officer Lightoller anchoring a large ensemble cast. Two and a half hours, and none of it padded.

Dial 999 — Talking Pictures TV, 8:30pm

An archive ITC crime series from the late 1950s, Robert Beatty’s Canadian detective working London cases on secondment to the Met. Episode 17, one of a run that rarely strays from straightforward procedure.

Confessions of a Window Cleaner — Talking Pictures TV, 9pm

The 1974 film that started the Confessions series and made Robin Askwith’s Timothy Lea a household name of a particular, cheerfully lowbrow kind. It’s a period piece now as much for what it says about British comedy taste in the mid-1970s as for the film itself.

The Heritage Chart Show with Mike Read — Talking Pictures TV, 10:45pm

Former Radio 1 DJ Mike Read runs through the Heritage Chart, a vote-based countdown built around older artists still touring and recording, with clips and the odd interview. Episode 234 of a run that’s kept going largely on Read’s own enthusiasm for it.

Let’s Get Lost — Talking Pictures TV, 11:50pm

Bruce Weber’s 1988 documentary on jazz trumpeter Chet Baker, mixing recording-session footage, archive material and interviews with the people who knew him. A late-night change of pace from everything else on the schedule tonight.

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 runs as one unbroken sequence with no split films. A Night to Remember, the 1958 Titanic drama, opens at 6pm, then Dial 999 at 8:30pm and Confessions of a Window Cleaner (1974, Robin Askwith) at 9pm carry primetime. The Heritage Chart Show with Mike Read follows at 10:45pm, and Let’s Get Lost, Bruce Weber’s 1988 Chet Baker documentary, closes the night from 11:50pm. 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.

A Night to Remember is the one to catch tonight, from 6pm. It’s still the Titanic film historians reach for over the Hollywood version decades later: Roy Ward Baker worked from Walter Lord’s account of the sinking rather than an invented romance, and the result plays more like reconstructed disaster reporting than melodrama. Confessions of a Window Cleaner, from 9pm, is the tonal opposite: the 1974 film that kicked off an entire run of British sex comedies and made Robin Askwith a star of sorts, for anyone curious what was filling cinemas between the kitchen-sink dramas and the Bond films.

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