Talking Pictures TV

Talking Pics TV is probably my favourite channel now! It's really good for those very performance-centred films from the 60s that have been hard to find or unreleased on DVD, like Morgan A Suitable Case for Treatment, and some of the (admittedly creaky) old TV shows have early appearances from the likes of John Hurt etc.. They are very responsive on Twitter so it's worth asking if there's something you'd like to see (I'm hoping they'll unearth Work is a Four Letter Word or Smashing Time - they probably haven't aged well but I love those 60s 'jolie laide' actors). They're also starting to show foreign-language films - Herzog's Nosferatu is getting another outing tonight.

I did not know that! I saw it once when I was a kid - David Warner growing magic mushrooms in a factory boiler room, or something like that.

I can highly recommend the very obscure late 70s TV series "Rooms" which they are showing on Thursday and Friday afternoons. Stand-alone 2-part dramas set in a house full of bedsits in Barons Court. It's a fascinating slice of 1970s life with some amazing casts. In a few weeks they are starting another repeat run of ITV's "Armchair Theatre" which is a mixed bag but has some real gems.

I love the scenes of post-industrial but pre-redevelopment London and elsewhere you get in some of these films: even something fairly rubbish like the circus horror on the other week had a great opening filmed around Tower Bridge and the shabby docklands. Keep an eye out for 'The Small World of Sammy Lee' which they've shown from time to time and is a nice slice of late 50s/early 60s Soho.

You might want to check out BBC iPlayer for a wonderfully nostalgic (well nostalgic for an ancient like me!) John Betjeman Monitor film showing views of 50s London.  His other films are worth a look as well.

www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/group/p025jt33 

Slightly OT but I've been trying to see a film called Julie and the Cadillacs. It's apparently a real stinker and flopped spectacularly but I like the CD. Was shown once on C5 years ago but no DVD and none of the film finding services could help. I thought I'd found it online recently but isn't actually there. Any leads folks ?

For the Pinter fans, the 1968 film of The Birthday Party is on tonight at 10:00.

Did anyone catch last week's 1960s Uncle Silas adaptation in the 'Mystery and Imagination' slot (9pm Sundays)? It was great fun, played sort-of-straight but with full-on Victorian melodrama scenery-chewing gusto. This week it's Ian Holm as Frankenstein and the creature.

I would like to point out that the 2nd February 1960 show includes the principals from the original London cast of The Most Happy Fella which opened at the Coliseum on 21 April 1960 – Art Lund, Libi Staiger, Helen Scott, Inia Te Wiata and Jack De Lon.  I stood at the back of the Balcony for the first night and was bowled over by the power of all the performances which had no trouble reaching the very top of the auditorium without amplification.  Presumably the whole cast was in London for rehearsals well before the opening night and in those days there were usually not a lot of 'previews' although I am not sure about that.

I was watching an old 50's black and white film, "Tiger in the Smoke", which I had recorded and I thought: "Gosh. That actor looks like Martin Clunes. He's got the same mannerisms as well."
A quick google on IMDB revealed it was Alec Clunes, Martin's dad.

From small beginnings and the showing of some very old-fashioned and often obscure British films, Talking Pictures has rooted itself in the TV schedules as an option for something to view when consciously TV modern channels can have a '57 Channels and Nothing On' quality to them.

It has steadily gone from earlier decades-TV programmes forgotten for good reason, through to landmark old TV series, vintage films and a smattering of short public information films, GPO film unit documentaries and Imperial War Museum-made works that provide perspective via some of Britain's TV and film history. Children's Film Foundation-made films have cropped up from time to time, along with prize-winners and distinguished early-career documentaries by feature film directors who went on to win big prizes in the international film and TV industry.

Last week for the second time I watched a short, amateur-looking film about the last day of the trolleybus between Hammersmith and Cricklewood, while on other occasions it's been half an hour on the old Covent Garden wholesale market, a day in the life of Waterloo Station, or the ferocious British winter of 1963. I've still got Dandy Nichols in The Birthday Party to watch, while the kitchen-sink dramas that Woodfall Films turned out get regular airings, with quite different 'social problem' films contemporaneous with theirs from the 1950s and 1960s revealing how clumsily or subtly or innocently various issues got treated.

Rather like the spirit-raising effect that early years Channel 4 had on so many of us in the early 1980s, the arrival of Talking Pictures five or so years ago and what it has eventually got around to showing has proved just as fascinating and provided some relief from low standard current TV efforts.