The BBC

I don't know what Talking Pictures is, unless you mean a BBC programme that's on on Saturday afternoons sometimes.

The thread then became too technical for me.

Channel 81 on Freeview. Mostly old, terrible British movies with the occasional cracker.

Also some British TV shows from the 60s/70s like the genuinely entertaining Human Jungle with Herbert Lom.

https://talkingpicturestv.co.uk/

TV channel dedicated to old, mainly British, films and TV. Available on Freeview, Youview, Sky, Virgin etc

xpost to Tom D

Today's highlights:

Selected highlights 21-March #TPTV
10:25 THE LARGE ROPE (1953)
11:50 CARLTON BROWN OF THE F.O. (1959)
13:40 NEUTRAL PORT (1940) Premiere
15:30 THE BLACK ROSE (1950)
17:50 ABOVE US THE WAVES (1955)
19:50 TURN THE KEY SOFTLY (1953) Premiere
21:30 THE SEEKERS (1954) Premiere pic.twitter.com/l6DezV1syr

— Talking Pictures TV (@TalkingPicsTV) March 20, 2020

bees on the boat-deck conspicuous by its absence

I need to investigate some of these channels. Maybe more films are on that I realise.

(I don't have anything more advanced that Freeview or Freesat.)

... Channel 81, Freeview.

If you're into spaghetti westerns and are an early riser I noticed recently that Channel 40 seems to show (usually pretty bad) spag westerns every morning.

It's channel 81 on Freeview assuming your tuning is up to date. It's one of the half dozen channels I always check if I'm looking for something that might be watchable. The quality of the movies is wildly variable but there's a lot on there that you don't see anywhere else.

Ah sorry Tom beat me to it.

There are multiple other movie channels that show good things from time to time. You know about London Live and Film 4 obv, but there's also Sony Movies (32, modern stuff), Sony Movies Action (40, war films), Sony movies classic (50, showing African Queen and Big Heat later today). Horror Channel (70) often has decent films on too, along with a lot of terrible ones.

These elderly people would have just died anyway | me for the BBC news website pic.twitter.com/LhGNopAC4X

— Je téléphone à la police (@je_police) March 21, 2020

I complained to the BBC about that god-awful "trad wives" thing they ran on the website a month or so ago. Here's the response I got- cheers!

We’re contacting you to apologise that we were unable to reply to the complaint you made earlier this year to the BBC. We regret that we could not provide you with our usual level of service.

This happened after large numbers of complaints were submitted to the BBC at the end of last year and we were unable to reply to everyone within our normal time periods. We would like to reassure you however that we circulated your complaint to the production team and BBC management the following morning, so they were aware of yours and the other overnight feedback the next day.

Thanks for the film channel recommendations.

I note that others know channels by their numbers. I don't know the number of any channels or have a reliable spatial sense in my head of where they are in relation to each other. I imagine BBC1 as the start and then I press a button and it scrolls down (but it's hard to get the right button sometimes) in a not entirely logical way. Film4 is several pages later for some reason.

Perhaps one can find a channel just by pressing the number in somehow? I could try that but I doubt that I would remember the numbers.

You could always use the on screen guide to see what films are on if remembering numbers is difficult.

i usually just page down the guide. some numbers i remember because i watch them a lot and because paging down a dozen times to get to TalkingPictures is a ballache.

I have found that I can get Sony Movies and watched 3:10 TO YUMA (2007) again that way last night.

Just add your favourite channels to your, uh, favourites list and scroll through that instead.

Watched the original of 310 on Criterion Channel this week, so good.

Re: movies, we’ve been watching criterion from the UK - you need a vpn to sign up but it doesn’t check your region once you’re streaming

(So you only need to use the vpn once)

I don't have a favourites list. Unfamiliar with how these things work. Have never found digital TVs very easy.

Agree with Chuck Tatum -- I think that the 1957 3:10 TO YUMA is tremendous and having watched the remake again last night, I now think that the original is probably better (I was unsure before).

R4 playing culture war against "wokeness" programming (presented by Helen Lewis) during the worst UK public health crisis in a century.

It's always good to vent our irritation with Helen Lewis.

I know this is BBC thread, but Sony Movies channels turn out to be an incredible find.

Sunday: 3:10 TO YUMA
Monday: MOON followed by BLADE RUNNER 2049
Wednesday: SATURDAY NIGHT & SUNDAY MORNING followed by A TASTE OF HONEY !!

I can't resist this!

they used to have very long annoying ad breaks but i've noticed that seems to have calmed down a bit

Freeview thread might be better for this stuff

Freeview Boxes : Classic or Dud?

All these Ian Nairn films are on iPlayer at the moment, fill yer boots https://t.co/ePm3qIQ3bo

— Gee (@BrokenBiros) March 24, 2020

could watch these a thousand times.

they've been on there for ages i think, have they put some more up?

Not BBC, but in a similar vein: http://meadesshrine.blogspot.com/p/shrine.html

oh wow sweet

I thought they'd just been put up again by that tweet. I ripped my own copies years ago.

I'd forgotten about Meadesshrine it's a great site, got most of them from the torrents but it's so nice to have them all in one place.

no, the nairns have been there a while. there's a lot of archive that's always available.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/categories/archive/featured

yeah it was thanks to the archive i fully realised how full of shit Kenneth Clark was

from there, this is very good:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b00drs8y/monitor-pop-goes-the-easel

Ken Russell's film on the Young British Artists of the day pioneering the Pop Art movement features Peter Blake, Peter Phillips, Derek Boshier and Pauline Boty. (1962)

Thanks for sharing the link to the archive, koogs - is there any way of seeing what's been put up there without having to scroll through pages of everything in alphabetical order?

i find the A-Z (of an individual category) on the TV app marginally more wieldy but i don't know beyond that

Problem with that is "Archive" is a category (unless there's something I'm not seeing) (which would not be unusual).

some of the categories are subdivided, but it's not obvious

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/group/p025z4rn - abstract art

pick an episode of something you like and on the page for that programme there *might* be a sub-category at the bottom, by the credits link

there certainly used to be a plainer page with all the categories on it as a list but, er, progress...

better link - https://www.bbc.co.uk/archive/collections

Hadn't seen those pages before but the iPlayer Collections are good too - loved working chronologically through the series on London (albeit all picked by Simon Jenkins so you have to look at his hi-res face before each prog): https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/group/p00synd3?page=1

> Hadn't seen those pages before but the iPlayer Collections are good too

those archive/collections are the same thing, i think, they keep reorging / renaming / redesigning the pages. the iplayer pages also seem to have added what i'd call 'box sets' to the mix, more recent stuff made available again, not exactly 'archive'

finding anything on any streaming service always seems like a crapshoot to me, especially when using a tv-remote to navigate.

Thanks Koogs- that is better (though like you I would still like a list I could slice how I wanted... I blame Netflix). Now I’m hoping they can slap up the other 20-odd BBC things dear old Nairn did, which I thought was what the tweet up thread was promising.

Going to watch the pop art thing later, looks interesting.

nairn’s Football Towns and Orient Express are both on youtube.

when i’m out and about not so much these days i sometimes practice a bit of a nairn slopey/arhyrmic walk. it genuinely does seem to help appreciate spaces around me in a contemplative fashion tho suspect some of this is because it’s slower than my habitual too-fast-paced gait and also it seems to cant your head slightly upwards and away from the immediate direction in front of you.

Nairn hates Huddersfield so much and with so much focus you'd almost be tempted to think he grew up there and I don't think he was really impressed with the mushroom columns of the Queensgate indoor market! I'm not sure the ugly as fuck Pompidou-lite stylings of Halifax Building Society building aged that well either tbh!

I do not understand Fizzles' post about walking differently. It sounds as though he's trying to be like Beckett's Watt.

FOOTBALL TOWNS, this must surely be good.