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We open with views of telephone wires which cuts to switchboard operators at work. This is followed by an interview with a woman who talks about her service with the early National Telephone Service. She reminisces about the early days of the telephone switchboard in Birmingham and remembers hearing news of the Titanic sinking. The privately run service was nationalised in 1912. During the interview there are a series of stills and illustrations.
Next at Great Chatwell in Staffordshire Richard Thompson visits one of the smallest telephone exchanges in the country. It is run from the home of Mr and Mrs Plant. Thompson talks to them and we see them at work at the switchboard desk which they run 24 hours a day for 76 local subscribers.
In contrast Thompson next visits the modern telephone exchange at Stafford where he talks to the supervisor Miss Williams and several of the female telephone operators. They talk about the newly introduced push button desks and how they compare with the old switchboards.
We then see the Mayor of Stratford upon Avon, Councillor S. C. Rosser making a call to the Mayor of Bristol, Alderman Charles Smith, to launch the town's Subscriber Trunk Dialling (STD) network (this event took place in the Baptist Church Hall on Payton Street on 15 December 1961). Thompson talks about the service and its pricing structure before making the first public call on the same network to Bill Lyon-Shaw who is programme controller at Tyne Tees Television in Newcastle. We intercut between both speakes on the call and there is also an establishing shot of the Tyne Tees studio. The film ends with a piece to camera from a Post Office spokesman about the future of the telephone service which he predicts will include complete STD coverage by 1970.
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