7 JUNE 1963, Page 7

Let's be Frank The newspapers are inordinately fussed about that

spectacularly trivial remark of Frank Phillips, especially when you consider that it was reasonable, it was clean, and it happened at seven in the morning when surely, nobody cared. Is it a tribute to the infallibility of the BBC that its most minute slip should be news? Maybe this reflects a conviction of inferiority on the part of the pressr which after all makes its own slips, humanly, every day and would be astonished if these became news. One national newspaper recently and gloriously printed a story about a hore-drawn carriage, but I didn't notice the BBC reporting the event.

CLIFFORD HANLEY