I’ll take Talking Pictures over the licence fee, thanks
Simon Heffer sings the praises of the TV channel that gives succour to those who remember the good old days
Three or four years ago, one of my dearest friends asked me: “Have you seen Talking Pictures?” Surely, I thought, he could not be inquiring whether I watched old films, because he knew I did – he and I talk about them all the time. No: he was referring to the TV channel of that name that shows only old (mainly British) films and television series. I had failed to notice it buried in the depths of the hundreds listed on my satellite TV menu. An evening soon afterwards spent in its company was enough to leave me a hopeless addict – and it appears I am not alone. It seems at a most unsettling time in our lives, a nation longing for reminders of how life used to be have been flocking to the sanctuary of Talking Pictures.
At the start of lockdown, the channel, which launched quietly five years ago, had around three and a half million viewers a week. Latest reports suggest numbers are now six million.
This is of no surprise to me. You could spend days and nights doing nothing but watch this channel
– handy when recently there was nothing to do but watch TV. Not only is every film you ever saw on wet Sunday afternoons in the Sixties and Seventies there, but so too are many of the same sort that you never knew existed, with stellar examples of the great British B-movie from the Fifties.
There are other treats, too. Thanks to cooperation from the Imperial War Museum, there are numerous Ministry of Information films from wartime and shortly afterwards; and television series from an era when they were not propaganda but intelligent entertainment: Rumpole of the Bailey,
Public Eye and, best of all, one of the finest TV series ever made, John Finch’s A Family at War.
And, just when you thought things couldn’t possibly get any better, the channel recently started showing the
Fifties series The Adventures of Robin
Hood, starring Richard Greene, who, to millions of us, was Robin Hood.
That is one of the most heartwarming aspects of Talking Pictures: to watch it is to spend quality time with old friends. Alec Guinness, Margaret Lockwood, Jack Hawkins, Valerie Hobson, Liz Fraser and John Gregson are some of the ubiquitous stars from the British cinema’s golden age who pop up in the schedules. So, too, do films from Ealing, Gainsborough, British Lion and Hammer Studios. The directors and producers include Powell and Pressburger and the Boulting brothers. It is the televisual equivalent of a capacious comfort blanket.
This remarkable service is run from a shed in the Hertfordshire garden of Noel Cronin, a former film producer and distributor, who started off as a 14-year-old post boy for the Rank Organisation.
It is often said that those who watch Talking Pictures are elderly – for example, my parents-in-law, in their 80s, love it. The advertising is often for support mattresses, incontinence pads, pensions and other items one might associate with those enjoying a long life. This contention has been supported by the uncertainties of lockdown, the particular vulnerability of the elderly and the soothing delight of retreating into nostalgia – something Talking Pictures doles out in tramloads, and which is the perfect antidote to today’s Britain. But talking to friends in their 30s, 40s and 50s, one soon learns that the channel is a guilty pleasure for many whose parents were barely born when some of the films shown on it were made.
The success of Talking Pictures has several causes, principal among them the downright stupidity and prejudice of the average television executive. In the Nineties, Cronin started buying up the rights to old films and TV serials because they were dirt cheap, and dirt cheap because television executives decided no one would want to watch them. This was not least because they were in black and white. As time passed, this mentality seems to have morphed into a sense that no one should watch them any more. After all, most of Talking Pictures’ programming celebrates the monoculture; it comes
from an age when men were men and women were housewives, “diversity” was a word in hardly anyone’s vocabulary, and everyone wore hats. Also, one needs a basic understanding of real money, of an age when there were 12 pennies in a shilling and 20 shillings in a pound, and a half-crown was a certain passport to happiness.
In those days, films and television did not lecture people, or seek to manipulate them and brainwash them in the way too many contemporary ones do now: they just entertained.
Talking Pictures is the polar opposite of cancel culture: it reflects a society most of us were quite happy to live in, and would happily endure again. It raises two impish fingers to the small, noisy minority that seeks to dictate how we should think and should feel, and who regard the past – especially the British past – as an epic crime scene and source of shame.
Unwittingly, in 2018, the channel broadcast a programme in which there was so-called “racist language”. Ofcom was called in, and now the channel precedes its programmes with polite warnings that what they are about to see includes outdated attitudes or language that may offend. This is all the better to educate the young about the past; yet I often realise, having watched an old film, that I have failed to spot these outrages entirely, so I must be even worse than I think I am. In that, too, I doubt I am alone.
Cronin has said people ask him to show old episodes of Z-Cars and Dixon
of Dock Green, but the BBC won’t sell him the rights. Either it is being the dog in the manger, or perhaps its executives realise they have misjudged the viewing public, and have retro plans of their own. That would be better than their continuing to force upon viewers programmes pandering to the right-on, metropolitan prejudices of the small but noisy minority they meet at dinner parties, or in their Soho clubs.
Perhaps black-and-white films will reappear in the existing schedules, or the BBC will start its own repeats channel (it used to have one: it was called BBC Two…). Unless executives think such stuff, with its “attitudes” and “language”, is too dangerous to be allowed out today. If it really does think such nonsense, then the sooner the licence fee is abolished, the better.
The lesson of Talking Pictures is clear. It portrays the England millions of us wish we still lived in. That is why we flock to it. It reminds us of an age when we were a steady, quietly heroic people who didn’t engage in panic, self-hatred or self-congratulation.
It is a land without face masks and hectoring, of live and let live and shrugging off with a bemused smile attempts to cause offence.
It is why the Twitter mob that seeks to hijack our lives and our culture will never win. Talking Pictures proves there are many more of us, quietly putting our feet up to watch Sid James, than there are of them.
It reflects a society most of us were quite happy to live in, and would happily endure again