BBC and Sky's free family-run rival showing some of UK's best-ever films

First screened in January 1966 starring Adam West as the Caped Crusader, Batman was ground-breaking entertainment, thrilling children and adults alike with its deadpan humour and colourful villains. Unseen on British television for more than a decade, it’s returning on Saturday courtesy of Talking Pictures TV.

The camp series is the latest canny signing by the booming nostalgia station, which is celebrating its 10th year on air this month while attracting up to six million viewers a week by screening long-forgotten films and series from the distant past.

Like certain digital radio stations, Talking Pictures TV has found a lucrative gap in the market catering for viewers whose interests lie in old movies and cosy television.

Charmingly, despite vying with streaming giants like Netflix for viewers, the channel is run from a small extension to the family home of its founder Noel Cronin, 76. Noel and his loved ones run the show from near Kings Langley, Hertfordshire, in a space with room for just three desks.

“It’s great to be bringing Batman and his faithful sidekick, the Boy Wonder, Robin, back to a new audience of young and old alike,” says Noel.

“We’ll be showing it each and every Saturday at 9am in our Saturday Morning Pictures slot. It’s a wonderful series, on so many different levels, that people have a lot of affection for.”

And there lies the success of TPTV. In a media landscape dominated by big, foreign-owned corporate players, the success of the family-owned and run station has been nothing short of remarkable.

Launched just nine years ago, with no fanfare of publicity, TPTV now draws in an audience of between four and six million viewers a week, with its eclectic mix of black-and-white films, vintage TV series and documentaries.

Among its legions of devoted fans are ex-Radio One DJ Mike Read, who co-presents hit weekly show The Footage Detectives, the comedian Vic Reeves and the Royal Family – the late Queen reportedly cheered herself up watching Laurel and Hardy on the channel when she was ill with a bad cold over Christmas 2016. Noel, who has spent his life in British television and film, puts the station’s success down to catering for an age group otherwise ignored by organisations like the BBC, Netflix and Prime.

“I think about recognising a niche in the market and really catering for an age group that modern television has little to do with,” he says. “I’m 77 this year which helps as I’m certainly in the age demographic neglected by other channels and I can understand what viewers of my age like to see. I try to watch new films, but I just can’t get into them.”

How Talking Pictures came into being is a story worthy of a documentary itself.

It began in north-west London 60 years ago when Noel, born in famed Abbey Road in St John’s Wood – “but at the wrong end” – got a job at the Rank Organisation post room straight after leaving school.

Set up as Britain’s answer to Hollywood by the Methodist flour mill tycoon J Arthur Rank in 1937, Rank became Britain’s largest film company – not only making films but distributing them and showing them in its cinemas, too.

“I started right at the bottom as a postboy in 1962,” Noel explains. “Rank was massive then. I worked my way up the system.

“I went to the Film Let Department at the Rank Advertising Films Division in Park Royal, where they checked the adverts for the cinemas, before being promoted to the cutting rooms in Hill Street, Mayfair.

“My editor was very old-fashioned and, to be frank, the training was so boring. I was a 16 to 17-year-old lad and I had to stand by his shoulder all day and just watch. The highlight of my day was to go and sharpen the Chinagraph pencils to mark the film to cut – then I could at least sit down for five minutes! The job didn’t last.

“They said they didn’t think I had a career in editing, but they were very sweet. They told me to take my time and leave when I wanted to.” Eventually, Noel moved into distribution and set up his own company with the aim of licensing films to television stations. In time, he built up a sizable collection of material.

“I was offered films and I always thought there was a way of selling these things. A very big library came up from the BBC, of black and white films,” he recalls. “It took me several years of negotiation with them to buy that library. I also bought the rump end of the old Southern TV archive – all the short series that they didn’t want. We made them an offer and acquired them.”

But Noel was finding that interest in showing vintage films from television companies was waning. “One of the satellite companies told me, ‘We don’t play black and white after 4pm’. I said, ‘I think you’re wrong, a good black and white film is a good film and a bad colour film is a bad film’.”

But it was this move away from the classics that led to the formation of TPTV.

“By then, we had this huge library – probably 600 to 700 films and various other things we’d acquired – and we weren’t selling it anywhere, or at least not much of it. So my daughter Sarah and I decided to start our own television station.

“I’d always been on the technical side and Sarah had been on the producing side but we’d never worked for a TV station before.”

Sarah Cronin-Stanley, 45, who now runs the channel with her father and her husband Neill, admits: “It was a very quick learning curve. There were all kinds of difficulties, the financial thing – trying to raise the money was a nightmare – because everybody said, ‘You’re far too late, you’ve got no chance of getting a TV station up and running, you should have done it 10 years ago.’”

But TPTV did launch on May 26, 2015, and moved onto Freeview a few months later. Noel’s judgment about the appeal of the kind of programmes other channels thought “old hat” proved to be well and truly vindicated.

“Although it was very humble at the beginning, the rise in ratings was really quite quick,” he recalls. “We went from zero to quite respectable in only a few months.”

It probably helped that established channels had got into something of a rut with their programming.

“When ITV and BBC decided that cheap daytime programmes were the way to go, it was the beginning of the end for television,” he continues. “You’re killing people’s imagination with that.”

TPTV received another big boost to its audience figures during the Covid lockdowns of 2020 and 2021, with millions of people told to stay at home by the Government. For many, escaping into the world of old black-and-white films was a lifeline. TPTV became a ratings hit, but the official figures may even underestimate its popularity.

“The thing about us which is different from other stations is that once people find us they stay with us – tuning in every day – so they’re not counted as unique viewers,” adds Sarah.

It’s not only the output of TPTV which is “retro”. The word definitely applies to the way the channel is run, too. While the programmes are transmitted from Chiswick, the nerve centre of the operation remains the Cronin’s family home near Watford.

Although there are computers in the TPTV HQ, Noel plans the schedules the old-fashioned way, with pen and paper. Each film has its own index card. “Our biggest thing is to avoid playing what other channels have shown recently,” he says.

He is not a fan of “stripping” – the modern television practice whereby series are played by some channels on a daily basis – or even episodes shown back-to-back.

“I like to show one episode each week on the same day,” he explains. “I always say it’s like chocolate. A few pieces of it are nice but if you eat one bar straight after another, you get sick of it.”

Recent additions to the schedule include surviving episodes of the police procedural Dixon of Dock Green – the station recently showed a long-lost episode unseen since 1959 – plus 1970s BBC drama The Brothers, and the popular western, Bonanza.

There’s also been a return to our screens of television’s worst-dressed man – the kind-hearted scarecrow Worzel Gummidge, played so memorably by the late Jon Pertwee.

Every Saturday, starting at 9am, the station shows a collection of films and serials that older viewers would have watched back in their childhood.

The CHANNEL has also become the go-to place for fans of Gerry Anderson’s innovative sci-fi puppet adventures from the 1960s, with Thunderbirds, Stingray and Fireball XL5 all receiving regular plays.

Both Cronin and his daughter are keen to stress TPTV’s role as an archive channel, preserving Britain’s film heritage. They have restored and then screened a number of films previously thought to be lost.

On The Footage Detectives, which goes out on Sunday afternoons at 5pm, there are regular appeals for viewers to send in any old reels of celluloid they might find stored away in their attics or garages. Who knows what treasures might be found on them?

The relationship they have with their viewers is something the Cronins are very proud of and is probably unique in modern British television. “We are a community,” Sarah adds. “People send us cakes and biscuits. I don’t think there are many channels where you can just ring to have a chat, make suggestions or say that the programme you’ve just watched is rubbish!

“But we love that kind of interaction with our viewers.”

● Talking Pictures TV is available on Freeview Ch 82, Sky 328, Freesat 306 and Virgin 445. Batman begins on Saturday at 9am. Some films can be watched by the Encore service via talkingpicturestv.co.uk