A Star Is Born

Of all the various forms of press censorship, an unspoken agreement between newspaper editors to exercise voluntary self-censorship strikes me as the most sinister. One such suspicion occurred to me at Easter of last year, when they showed a documentary film about the private life of Princess Anne and Captain Mark Phillips on television. In the Princess Anne Mrs. Mark Phillips (or Dame Anne Phillips, as I maintain she should be called after receiving the GCVO for bravery in resisting kidnap by a madman called Ian Ball a short time after her marriage) it seemed to me that a new star had been born. I expected the television critics to be raving about her.

Instead of which, they all tastefully looked the other way. I did not see a single mention in any newspaper of this supremely comic performance. I was in hospital at the time, and it had the patients falling out of their beds. My family, quite independently, watched it in Somerset, and felt so moved they had to telephone me about it. Everybody I met who had seen it felt the same. Yet not a word appeared in the newspapers the next day.

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Auberon Waugh

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Of all the various forms of press censorship, an unspoken agreement between newspaper editors to exercise voluntary self-censorship strikes me as the most sinister. One such suspicion occurred to me at Easter of last year, when they showed a documentary film about the private life of Princess Anne and Captain Mark Phillips on television. In the Princess Anne Mrs. Mark Phillips (or Dame Anne Phillips, as I maintain she should be called after receiving the GCVO for bravery in resisting kidnap by a madman called Ian Ball a short time after her marriage) it seemed to me that a new star had been born. I expected the television critics to be raving about her.

Instead of which, they all tastefully looked the other way. I did not see a single mention in any newspaper of this supremely comic performance. I was in hospital at the time, and it had the patients falling out of their beds. My family, quite independently, watched it in Somerset, and felt so moved they had to telephone me about it. Everybody I met who had seen it felt the same. Yet not a word appeared in the newspapers the next day.