And to think I didn’t see it coming

Victoria Beckham, as you may have heard on the terraces, is no stranger to the ‘A’ word. Her appetite for it is widely discussed, and although there’s no way of telling how often David does it, all kinds of other people have obliged, presumably because that’s the way she likes it. The way things are going, this columnist could be next. Yes, it’s true: Posh likes nothing better than a bit of apology.

The latest act of contrition – she really does get a lot, just Google ‘victoria beckham apology’ – was performed by OK! magazine, which admitted that its cover shot of La Becks arm-in-arm with Cheryl Cole wasn’t quite what it seemed. Or rather, it was exactly what it seemed: a hasty Photoshop job in which one of Cheryl’s hands appears to be attached to her thigh. Not only had OK!’s pixel-benders spliced two unrelated pictures of the soccer-spoused songstresses, they’d also – and this, perhaps, was what really rankled – changed the colour of Mrs B’s dress. Horreur! We shall never know how many wannabe WAGs got up on the morning of 11 February and selected entirely inappropriate frocks. It hardly bears thinking about.

So OK! has issued a ‘grovelling apology’, as the rest of the press explained it, or ‘terse 63-word correction’, in the technical jargon we journalists would use when not gloating. But the damage is done. The worst part is, I now find myself wondering if I can rely on the other stories in OK!.

‘Mena Suvari is having trouble finding a wedding dress that covers her tattoos.’ But is she? Maybe she waltzed into the first shop and grabbed one off the peg, and it covered those tattoos just fine. How are we to know? ‘Renee Zellweger says she’s constantly late because her fans hold her up.’ Do they? Or is it, in fact, a common occurrence for the Bridget Jones star to be reminded of engagements and speeded on her way by helpful admirers? ‘A lost cat was found living in a sofa.’ Pardon my scepticism, but I would frankly not even be surprised to find out it was an ottoman.

Yet, dear reader, I must relinquish any claim to the moral high ground. For while this column has never faked a story (all right, there was that business about Steve Ballmer and the raccoon, but you’ve got to admit that was funny), it has indulged in speculation which has been proved entirely unfounded and without a shred of accuracy. I refer, of course, to my suggestion four weeks ago that Apple was suffering from ‘the lack of a big idea’.

Go on, laugh away. I can take it. Anyone can be wrong. Not quite as wrong as this, one always hopes when sitting down to type another 850 words of well informed and stylishly composed opinion, but sooner or later it’s going to happen. When Wired magazine’s July 1997 cover story predicted ‘25 years of prosperity, freedom, and a better environment’, it wasn’t stupidity, just a forgivable oversight. Had the writers correctly inserted the decimal point in ‘2.5 years’, and finished the sentence with ‘followed by the most relentless shitstorm since the Black Death’, they would have been spot-on. My error last month was equally blameless, and hardly on the same scale. Nevertheless, there’s a brutal irony here that I realise cannot be overlooked.

Could there have been a worse time to complain that Apple had no grand plans? Nothing to match the iMac, I said – as if anyone remembers that now! No quantum leap like the launch of the iTunes Store, changing forever the way we consume entertainment – how important that used to seem! It was hardly my fault that my thinking was stuck in the world that existed before 11 March 2009, or ‘pre 3/11’, as we think of it these days. In all fairness, I wasn’t the only one who couldn’t see the tsunami-like paradigm shift that was coming. It wasn’t just, to paraphrase JBS Haldane, bigger than we imagined; it was bigger than we ever could have imagined.

But that’s cold comfort. I’m under no illusion that posterity will be merciful. No, history will remember me, if at all, as the fool who ascribed a lack of big ideas to the company that invented – and, in the cruellest twist of all, launched on the exact date my words reached the newsstand – the talking MP3 player.

Mere apologies would be futile. I can only be grateful that the editor has replaced my photo with the head of a Bornean gibbon pasted onto the body of an ageing social worker who plays rhythm guitar in a Dire Straits tribute band on the weekend*, thus averting the ridicule I might have attracted if recognised. I will, of course, be offering my resignation and waiving the £703,000-a-year pension to which columnists are traditionally entitled. Employment prospects are poor in today’s media market, but I hear there’s a job going on the picture desk at OK!.

Adam Banks still hasn’t found a wedding dress that covers his tattoos.

Published in MacUser, 9 April 2009

*My photo in the magazine actually looked like this. Really.

Tagged as: Apple, Design, iPod, MacUser, Media