The word on the street: Bearn holds back, Dacre's malapropism, BBC's uncomfortable launch

*Emily Bearn's Week in the Sunday Telegraph magazine concentrated on the fascinating subject of running a second-hand clothes stall at a village fête. It's a pity there didn't seem to be space for any other activities in her week – such as the opening of the exhibition by her lover, Lucian Freud (or even preparing for it, if deadlines meant she had to write about the previous week). Maybe The Sunday Telegraph's readership just can't get enough of village fêtes.

*Paul Dacre proved himself not averse to a good malapropism last week. On learning that a massive asteroid had narrowly missed Earth, he asked: "Are you doing me a brilliant graphic on the asterisk?"

*A story ran last week in The Daily Telegraph, based on a Vanity Fair interview with the sister of Steve Bing, father of Liz Hurley's baby. The Telegraph, unusually, also credited the interviewer, Vicky Ward. Perhaps it was just feeling generous – or perhaps it remembered that Ms Ward is the wife of the nephew of the Telegraph's proprietor, Conrad Black.

*Norman Lebrecht, arts editor of the London Evening Standard, should be more careful when boasting to the world's press. He told The Wall Street Journal, which was for some strange reason interested, that he had hired a wonderful new art critic. He was presumably referring to the second-string reviewer Andrew Renton; but admirers of Brian Sewell assumed that their hero had been sacked.

*The BBC's and Channel 4's competition for the trendiest programme launches continues. While C4 thinks itself hip but makes itself ridiculous by having loud music playing while journalists want to talk to producers, the BBC made life hard at its Commonwealth Games launch last week in a supposedly cool London restaurant. The room was so small that journalists couldn't move and found it difficult to take notes; and it was so hot and airless, they could barely breathe. Still, the food was nice.