Sean Connery and the hidden joys of lockdown TV

It is incredible to see Sean Connery play gormless. A big lump of a thicko squaddie in thrall to a skiving spiv, he’ll gaze at the pencil he’s sharpening with child-like wonder while his idea of an evening’s entertainment is … knitting.

Sean Connery in On The Fiddle (1961) Picture: Shutterstock

Incredible because a year later - 1962 - the former Edinburgh milkman, swimming pool attendant and art school life model would be James Bond in the first 007 film, Dr No.

Licensed to kill. Accredited to always be surrounded by guns, gadgets and girls. Instructed to indulge in dangerous thrills often. And, when Ursula Andress emerges, mermaid-like, from the deep you will be well-mannered enough - you were educated at Fettes College, after all - to look interested when she tells you about her conch-shell collection.

It’s incredible that Dr No and the squaddie film, On the Fiddle, were just 12 months apart, and that cheerily innocent British comedies based round the army life were still being made so close to the emergence of Bond and the heroes of the Angry Young Men flicks Saturday Night and Sunday Morning and Room at the Top, all of them bringing us the hot news that major social and cultural change was on the way and the Sixties were about to swing. But discovering this is one of the joys of Talking Pictures TV.

Have you discovered this channel yet? It’s in the movies section of your telly planner, but a long scroll down from the new releases. Everything on it is old. There will be some films you might know but many you won’t. And there will be a few where you’ll go: “Three mad spinster sisters in a haunted house trying to poison their nephew’s new wife - this is the sort of thing that Granny would have sat us down to watch on rainy Sunday afternoons with chunks of Dundee cake as heavy as half-bricks.”

This was probably Crow Hollow, made in 1952, which popped up at 6.05am the other morning, its moment having arrived at last. No-one in it went on to be quite as big as Connery but then few have. The previous morning I’d woken up with Anita Ekberg, as you do, playing a diabolical jewel thief.

Talking Pictures TV is like finding a secret chamber in your attic you didn’t know was there, and a big dusty trunk inside. In it are musicals, comedies, whodunnits, ghost stories, moral tales, morale-boosters, before-they-were-famous curios and B-movies which happen at a breakneck pace.

Often, everything’s concluded in little over an hour. The men all wear suits, the women conical bras. Guns are fired but you don’t see blood. On trains - the channel loves trains - passengers sit opposite each other and contemplate the plot’s next 180-degree turn. The channel doesn’t bother with “mermaid-like”, going for full fish-girl (Mr Peabody and the Mermaid, which prompted the exclamation when she was reeled in: “Holy jumping Moses!”).

I didn’t know the trunk was there and I didn’t know the Edinburgh Festival had ever been the setting for a musical, Happy Go Lovely, made in 1951 and starring Vera-Ellen, with this heavenly Hollywood creature, for the only time in her life, being addressed: “Och, ya besom.” In Technicolor, tram-rattling Auld Reekie there’s a chase along Princes Street. And you thought Trainspotting was first to do that.

It’s not just old movies on Talking Pictures, there are old TV dramas, too.

Episodes of Hazell - penned by the great, lost Scottish writer Gordon Williams - are stacked high in my planner like so many beige car coats in the backroom of a charity shop. Remember Armchair Theatre? Let’s hope those third and fourth lead actors, permanently “resting” now, can splash out on a crate of decent red with the repeat fees. The original Van der Valk, challenging the current reboot, has just begun. Now I want the channel to dig up The Brothers.

Maybe, with Covid-19 meaning that the networks could run out of new programmes by the autumn, we’ll all be tuned to Talking Pictures TV - and also because the question is being asked: “Is cinema dead?”

Obviously, Connery’s On the Fiddle is of its time so some scrupulous editing had to happen to remove the odd mention of “w*g”. Unfortunately the air-brush department can do nothing about our man’s dreadful pudding-bowl haircut.

But delve into that trunk and you won’t be disappointed. Especially if you find Hell Drivers which Talking Pictures TV screens often. It features, as grunting lorrymen, a pre-The Prisoner Patrick McGoohan, a pre-The Man From U.N.C.L.E. David McCallum, a pre-Pink Panther Herbert Lom and Connery again, still dreaming of that Aston Martin. No film has ever been more breakneck.

Who knew shifting ballast could be this exciting? Holy jumping Moses!