Talking Pictures TV: The return of black and white television

In an age where television viewers delight in high definition video and even 4D film, is there any solace for those who simply want to take in our favourite monochrome classics? Enter Talking Pictures TV, bringing a 24/7 supply of golden oldies

Michael Caine before he found Hollywood fame in the British B-movie ‘Blind Spot’ with Anne Sharp

Is there a finer relaxation than partaking of a Hob Nob Special?

For the uninitiated, this involves sitting on a comfortable sofa with your brew of choice to hand, a side-plate of biscuits (other brands are available, but I find the Hob Nob has a certain synergy with the activity), and enjoying without interruptions a cracking old black and white movie.

Many years ago it used to be something you could do on a daily basis as the terrestrial channels used to fill their daytime schedules with such cinematic treats of yore, there was always a nice early afternoon treat under the banner Monday Matinee or some such, a secret known only to homemakers, the unemployed, or kids home sick from school.

At some point daytime TV morphed into game shows, Australian soaps and people shouting at each other about the likely paternity of babies, and the great old black and white movies lost favour. This was probably around the same time as cable, satellite and Freeview channels opened up the UK television vista at an alarming rate, with old movie shunted away from the main schedules and on to mid-morning slots on Film4 or the likes of TCM and Movies4Men (the latter sounds like it’s something it’s not, for those with a nervous disposition about clicking on it with the remote).

Lovers of old cinema found some solace there, and also with the proliferation of cheap VHS, and then DVD deals at High Street stores such as HMV. Walk in there today and for £20 you can come out with five classics plucked from the shelves.

Still, there’s always been something vaguely unsatisfying about all that output, certainly for the true connoisseur. TCM is very US-focused, and as such you can tend to get a lot of Westerns and war movies. Movies4Men throws in some often random episodes of old serials.

Amanda Redman and Liv Ullmann star in ‘Richard’s Things’

So thank the monochrome gods of celluloid heaven for the utter delight that is Talking Pictures TV.

You’ll find the channel on Sky, Freesat, Virgin and Freeview HD, and it’s an unalloyed joy. Twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, of old movies, and unlike the odd slots given over to black and whites elsewhere, you won’t just get the usual suspects.

Talking Pictures’ raison d’etre is British movies, often the more obscure the better. Most of their output has rarely been on TV before, some of it never seen since the movie was shown in your local fleapit cinema 60 or 70 years ago.

The channel launched two years ago and has been quietly building a steady following. It’s earned itself some nice celebrity endorsements, as well; Paul O’Grady regularly mentions it on his Radio 2 show, other high-profile fans include Jim Moir (Vic Reeves), Danny Baker and Mark Gatiss, who likened the channel to “the comforting taste of oxtail soup and being off school”.

It’s now got more than 1.3 million regular viewers, and its slow-burn success still comes as something of a surprise, albeit a pleasant one, to the three-strong team that runs it.

They are Sarah Cronin-Stanley, her husband Neill, and Sarah’s father, Noel Cronin. It was Noel’s love of film and lifelong immersion in the movie industry that ultimately informed the channel’s very existence. Noel started off as a postboy in the Rank Organisation in 1963, working up to cutting room assistant and eventually editor at the Central Office of Information, working on public information films, before setting up his own distribution company called Dandelion Films and later Renown Pictures.

It was the latter company that was to prove crucial in the future of Talking Pictures, because Noel had an amazing magpie-like lust for movies, and began to buy up the rights to as many British films as he could.

Cronin-Stanley vividly remembers a childhood lived in a house with 35mm film canisters stacked high, forever added to by her father as he insatiably collected movies, and their rights. Many of these were B-movies, shown before the main event at cinemas, and which people thought there would be no further interest in.

But they were wrong. Through his distribution companies, Noel began to license the movies to terrestrial channels to show in their Hob Nob Special slots. With Cronin-Stanley and her husband on board, they began to expand to licensing the movies for DVD release, at about the same time as the terrestrial channels began to lose interest in showing old movies.

“Then we set up a film club online to sell our own DVDs,” she says. “We started getting sackloads of mail from people who couldn’t believe we had these films that they’d not seen for decades.”

Buoyed by the success of the film club and DVDs, the trio then began to think seriously about how great it would be to have their own TV channel.

“Our first idea was to call it something simple, like British Cinema,” says Cronin-Stanley. “We couldn’t get anyone interested at all. They were like, a channel showing only black and white films? Who would watch that? People have colour TVs!”

But they persevered and in 2015 the much more cosily-titled Talking Pictures TV launched on Sky, and has been building a following ever since.

Cronin-Stanley says, “I suppose our target demographic is the over-65s… a lot them remember the eras portrayed in the films, and some can remember seeing the actual films themselves. But what’s possibly surprised us is that we’ve also attracted a much younger following as well.”

The coup of putting Laurel and Hardy movies back on TV for the first time in years has obviously been a great boost to pointing people towards Talking Pictures, as has getting their listings printed in Radio Times.

Laurel and Hardy in 1935 short film ‘Thicker than Water’

They’re now getting hundreds of emails and letters every day from people who absolutely adore what they’re doing. “Including,” says Cronin-Stanley, “from a lot of carers who look after people with dementia; telling us how much they love being immersed back in the past that they remember.”

They also get lots of phone calls, and the close-knit nature of the team of three means that they are often manning the phones themselves. Stanley-Cronin recalls getting a call from a lady who informed her that her friend Elsie was coming around for afternoon tea. “She said she used to have a video of The Lavender Hill Mob but had lost it, and could we put it on about 2pm,” she laughs. “But it was only going to be a light tea, so if we could keep the adverts to a minimum so it didn’t go on too long…”

Talking Pictures, sadly for Elsie and her host, isn’t able to act as a classic movie jukebox like that, not only because they might not necessarily have the rights to the movie in question but because the content is carefully scheduled weeks in advance.

There's no randomness about the listings… Noel plots the schedules out, on cards laid out on his desk, in eight-week chunks, ensuring that there’s a seamless synergy with what’s shown… and that includes the Glimpses.

The Glimpses are Cronin-Stanley’s particular baby, short factual films that run between the movies and give us a peek at a Britain long gone. From steam train journeys to cautionary public information films to heartwarming little episodes of things such as a day in the life of a high-board champion diver, they knit together Cronin’s carefully planned movie streams. The whole ethos of Talking Pictures feels like carefully-curated time travel.

What is interesting is that Talking Pictures’ success has not gone unnoticed by some of the main TV channels, and more requests are coming in to the licensing side of the operation for the rights to show old movies.

If that means a return to the Hob Nob Specials of days gone by, then all to the good for the vintage film fan. But Talking Pictures TV has hopefully secured its position as the premier specialist channel for it to continue going from strength to strength.

Now if you’ll excuse me, there’s a 1955 crime thriller starring Honor Blackman which I’ve never seen before about to begin. The kettle’s on and the only question remaining is… milk chocolate or plain?