TALKING PICTURES TV

Television

Gustav Temple spoke to Sarah Cronin-Stanley about the television channel she launched six years ago with her father Noel Cronin, which now reaches 3.5 million viewers a week

What you’re doing is wonderful! I find it almost impossible to find classic black and white movies on any of the popular platforms, which don’t seem to value the origins of modern cinema. Was this why you founded Talking Pictures TV?

Our target audience doesn’t have access to Netflix, Amazon or BritBox. I know this because I think we’re one of the only channels in the world that has a direct relationship with its viewers. A lot of them don’t even have Internet access, so we’re taking them back to a time when they just wanted to watch the telly, and they can watch Talking Pictures TV on Freeview, Sky, Virgin or FreeSat. The schedules are devised by Noel every day, to ensure that there is a variety of drama, horror, pathos, comedy etc. We wanted to reintroduce the idea of the family sitting down and watching a film together, like the Saturday Morning Picture show.

Who founded the channel?

It’s me, my father Noel, my husband Neil and Archie, my son. We founded the channel six years ago.

And do you really run it from a shed in your garden?

Well, it isn’t quite a shed, more of an extension, but it certainly isn’t a great big glass building in Soho.

What sort of equipment do you have to use to produce the channel?

There’s a screening machine, so Noel can watch the old 16-mil and 35-mil film, a live broadcast of the channel on a monitor, three desks and three phones, and that’s it!

Are you continually adding titles to your list and how do you acquire said titles?

The whole reason why we were able to launch is because we own a library of film rights, under Renowned Pictures, our 20-year-old sister company.

Noel and I were both film distributors, so we used to sell film rights to all the terrestrial channels. That side of the business, of being the provider for the black and white Saturday afternoon matinee kind of died. So we thought, this is crazy, there’s a massive audience that wants to watch those films, and that’s why we launched Talking Pictures TV. We felt that both young and older film lovers were being neglected, as well as the films themselves.

A lot of the film rights that we want to buy from the major studios would take some big digging and lots of paperwork for them. We don’t want their big blockbusters; we want the stuff in their archives they’d forgotten they owned. The other problem is that a lot of the big films that we’d like to air are owned by American majors, and you cannot go to them and say, ‘I’d like this film for next Saturday’. Instead, you have to negotiate huge packages of films, in the hope that the one you want is in it.

Do you write each week’s schedule yourselves, with each description of each title? They are wonderfully summed up!

Some of them are provided by the content providers; some of them come from published reviews and some just from Noel’s memory. Also, everything we screen has to be watched six weeks before it’s aired.

Is the channel funded by advertising?

Yes, that’s the only source of revenue, like any other commercial channel. Some of them don’t spend any of their budget on subtitles, which we do, not because we’re legally obliged to but because we know our audience need it.

Why don’t you charge a subscription like Netflix, who give us mostly utter drivel for £9.99 a month?

Because we’re not on a streaming platform, we can’t at the moment, but we might have to do so in the future, just because of the natural progression of TV, but one of the huge reasons that Noel and I launched Talking Pictures was to provide something that was free and accessible to the people that really need it. Especially during these covid times; you should see our postbag – it would make you cry! We get so many letters from people isolated at home, of all age groups but particularly the over-75s, telling us that we really have kept them sane. It would be very hard to say to those viewers, one, you’ve got to get a computer, and two, you’ve got to pay us. That isn’t quite what we’re all about.

And that’s another reason why we’re so cross about the changes to the TV licence [no longer free for over 75s]. I think it’s outrageous that people are now paying for a TV licence and not watching the BBC, they’re watching our channel.

Do you believe in offering viewer warnings that alert the viewer to scenes in a film they may find offensive?

Yes, we’ve always done that. There are different laws for home video, where you’ve made a personal choice to buy that film, knowing there may be something offensive in it. But when you broadcast something, you have to follow the OfCom rules.

Where do you stand on the prevailing view that some audiences may find the language and attitudes in films and TV programmes from days gone by offensive or inappropriate, by today’s standards?

I think that history should teach us about the values of certain times in the past, and without the cultural material for viewers to experience it, they’ll never know what actually happened.

Would you ever show something like Mind Your Language?

I would love to show Mind Your Language but we haven’t secured the rights yet. We’ve shown programmes like It Ain’t Half Hot Mum where characters are blacked up, but that was purely because there weren’t many ethnic actors around when it was made.

Do you ever receive any complaints about such screenings?

We once had a complaint about a programme – one complaint, with 120,000 viewers – so you can’t please everybody. In fact, more viewers complain when we’ve silenced an offensive word than when we haven’t. n

A SAMPLE FROM THE TALKING PICTURES TV SCHEDULES

05:00 THE ROGUES 1965. Gig Young, David Niven and Charles Boyer are The Rogues, members of two related families of international forgers and conmen.

06:00 PHANTOM FROM SPACE 1953. Sci-Fi. Directed by W Lee Wilder. Stars Ted Cooper, Noreen Nash, Dick Sands & Burt Wenland. A radioactive alien crash-lands on Earth near a LA laboratory. His arrival attracts

much attention. (SUBTITLES AVAILABLE)

07:30 HAMMER THE TOFF 1952. Crime Drama by Maclean Rogers. The Toff (John Bentley) tries to help Susan (Patricia Dainton) reunite with her missing uncle who's been targeted by criminals after 08:10 BFI: POST HASTE 1934. Factual. Humphrey Jennings’ first film as a director, a brief overview of the British postal service.

10:30 I KNOW WHAT I LIKE 1973. A ‘lost’ short, directed by James Allen, featuring Bernard Cribbins OBE. With the help of some ‘family’ members, Bernard explains the process of brewing beer, from the pasture to the pint.

12.30 MAKE ME AN OFFER 1954. Comedy. Directed by Cyril Frankel. Starring Peter Finch. The story of Charlie, who as a boy fell in love with a Portland Vase on a trip to a museum, pursues his dream as an antiques dealer.

18:35 CHAIN OF EVENTS 1958. Drama. Director: Gerald Thomas. Stars Dermot Walsh, Susan Shaw & Lisa Gastoni. A clerk tries to dodge paying a bus fare, and it sparks all sorts of complications.

20:00 COPACABANA 1947. Musical Comedy. Director: Alfred E. Green. Stars Carmen Miranda and Groucho Marx. An agent has his only client pose as both a French chanteuse and Brazilian bombshell to fool a nightclub owner. (SUBTITLES AVAILABLE)

23:50 THE COTTON CLUB 1984. Drama. Director: Francis Ford Coppola. Stars Richard Gere, Gregory Hines, Diane Lane & Nicholas Cage. The Cotton Club was a nightclub in Harlem, famous for its visitors and Jazz music. 02:10 THE SKULL 1965. Horror. Directed by Freddie Francis. Stars: Peter Cushing, Christopher Lee, Patrick Wymark, Jill Bennett. Madness fills the mind of a professor who buys the stolen skull of the

Marquis de Sade. (SUBTITLES AVAILABLE)

03:20 BFI: TERMINUS 1961. Drama. Directed by John Schlesinger. Iconic short of a day in the life of a London Railway Station.

04:00 THE MIND OF MR JG REEDER: THE FATAL ENGAGEMENT 1971. Stars: Windsor Davies, Willoughby Goddard and Mona Bruce. A stream of gentlemen callers arrive at the flat of Hetty Malone, a musical star, only to learn that she is dead.