In 1939, on the eve of the Second World War, Paul Rotha made a big and expensive documentary for and about The Times, called The Fourth Estate, which remained unseen for 30 years. This was not just because the outbreak of war rendered a film about a newspaper in peacetime outdated before it had even been shown, and then it was just forgotten. According to Rotha himself (Marris 1982) the paper disapproved of his mildly satirical vision of its establishment role (so mild that it hardly registers nowadays) and withheld the film (until after the paper was taken over by the Thomson Organisation in 1967). Given an outing at the Tate Gallery in 2003 in a double bill with Norman McLaren’s Book Bargain (1937), a short for the GPO Film Unit about the manufacture of the London telephone directory, the contrast between the two films is striking. Rotha was a left wing social democrat, McLaren a member of the Communist Party who had just been to Spain with Ivor Montagu to shoot a film about the defence of Madrid against the Fascists. Rotha tries to beat the system and fails, McLaren doesn’t try and succeeds – that is, he turns out a simple factual film which, in eight minutes, unpretentiously reveals a slice of social and industrial history about the spread of a crucial modern technology of communication. Where the first London telephone directory in 1878 had no more than 200 entries, the 1937 directory listed 850,000 subscribers, ran to 2,500 pages, and its production required a dedicated printing operation as complex as that of a newspaper but with its own specialised machinery. We also learn, in the course of the film, that on one section of the production line the women swap their jobs around in order to try to alleviate their boredom a little, which, nearly 70 years later, prompts the response that such flexible labour practices are difficult to imagine under twenty-first century management. There is nothing about such things in the Rotha