Today in corrections
“A profile of Richard Eyre – ‘All good actors are quick-witted’, 27 November, page 12, Review – mentioned the theatre director’s recollection of having played one of the Three Little Maids in a school production of The Pirates of Penzance. Clarification has since come from the interviewee that in Pirates he played Kate, one of four maids, the daughters of Major-General Stanley (the Three Little Maids, for their part, belong to The Mikado).” [The Guardian]
That’s all well and good but though not opera related this item in the same article definitely needed correction:
Owing to an editing error, we said that Simply Red singer Mick Hucknall slept with more than 1,000 women in a three-year period during the mid-80s. That was meant to be more than 1,000 a year, based on his estimate of an average of three such encounters a day, as stated elsewhere in our stories (A new flame: Hucknall apology to 1,000 women he bedded, page 19, 3 December; ‘I feel a bit like the antichrist’, page 3, Film & Music).
The neglected 2000 must have felt like he didn’t care enough to remember them!
That’s assuming that all of the 3000 knew about each other — and cared.
The Guardian, of course, is well known as the paper that makes the biggest number of errors and typos, and has to print the greatest number of corrections as a result, hence its more usual name, The Grauniad.