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

Published: 6 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. Monday 7 September 2026 runs 23 programmes through the day, opening in the small hours with archive horror and adventure serials before daytime settles into features and detective drama. The evening is compact: a short archive item, The Special Patrol 1986, leads into the channel’s own clips strand The Footage Detectives at 7pm, then Maigret takes the 8pm hour and the 1939 French drama La Fin du Jour closes out from 10:05pm. Full breakdown below.

Talking Pictures TV Schedule: Monday 7 September 2026 (Full Listings)

Here is the complete Talking Pictures TV schedule for Monday 7 September 2026, on Freeview 82.

Overnight

Breakfast

Morning

Afternoon

Early evening

Primetime

Late night

What’s on Talking Pictures TV today

Monday’s overnight run opens with the 1973 horror feature Invasion of the Bee Girls at 2:20am, then a run of archive adventure series — The Adventures of Robin Hood, The Buccaneers and Supercar — carries the small hours towards breakfast. The Vise, an American-made crime anthology from the 1950s, opens the morning proper at 6am, before the feature-length Pit of Darkness runs through to 8am.

Tom Brown’s Schooldays, the 1951 adaptation of Thomas Hughes’ novel, fills most of the mid-morning slot from 8:10am. Z-Cars, one of British television’s earliest police procedurals, holds its usual late-morning spot, and the afternoon runs through Richard the Lionheart, the wartime drama Broken Journey, and a run of shorter archive items — Four Star Playhouse, Biscuit Time and the sitcom That’s My Boy — before the 1956 drama A Town Like Alice takes most of the pre-evening slot from 4:35pm.

Talking Pictures TV tonight — primetime and the evening schedule

Here’s the Talking Pictures TV primetime line-up for tonight, Monday 7 September 2026.

The Special Patrol 1986 — Talking Pictures TV, 6:50pm

A short archive item from the channel’s vault, running just ten minutes ahead of the evening’s longer features. Typical of the odd, unpromoted filler Talking Pictures TV tucks around its main slots.

The Footage Detectives — Talking Pictures TV, 7pm

The channel’s own strand, built around unpicking old and often unidentified film and newsreel footage from its archive. It’s closer to genuine detective work than celebrity nostalgia: tracking down where and when a clip was shot.

Maigret — Talking Pictures TV, 8pm

Georges Simenon’s Paris detective gets a full two-hour outing tonight (series 4, episode 5), slower and moodier than most British crime drama of the same vintage.

La Fin du Jour — Talking Pictures TV, 10:05pm

A 1939 French drama set in a retirement home for ageing actors, closing out the night. Pre-war continental cinema rarely gets a slot on British television outside a channel built specifically to dig this material out.

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 a short, compact evening. The Special Patrol 1986 leads in at 6:50pm, then The Footage Detectives takes 7pm. Maigret holds the 8pm hour, and the 1939 French drama La Fin du Jour closes the night from 10:05pm. 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.

Maigret is the one to catch tonight, from 8pm. Two hours is a long single sitting for a detective drama, but the channel rarely finds room for much else once something like this is scheduled. La Fin du Jour, from 10:05pm, is worth staying up for if pre-war French cinema is any kind of draw: a retirement home full of ageing actors, decades before that setting became a stock premise for anything British.

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