I’ve watched all manner of events on a big screen at the pub: football, rugby, that weird version of rugby that Americans in riot gear play, to name but a few. Last night, however, the London Macintosh User Group (LMUG) invited me to sample a whole new viewing experience over a pint of Guinness and a pack of pork scratchings: a Steve Jobs keynote.

Of course, nobody really watched the Apple keynote except the thousand or so US journalists and developers who were granted an Audience With Steve Jobs. Bizarrely – for a company that makes the Soviets look like corduroy-wearing liberals when it comes to exerting control over the media – Apple decided not to stream the event live.

Instead, the 80-odd people crammed into the basement room of the Wood Marylebone pub were forced to watch an Engadget text feed and two intensely irritating chaps from Twit.tv regurgitating the speech from an illicit video feed.  It was the technology equivalent of going down the pub to watch Sky’s Soccer Saturday, where a bunch of portly ex-footballer sit watching the match on their monitors and tell you what’s going on.

Occasionally, the LMUG chaps managed to find a video feed being smuggled out of the hall – but they were so blurry that you couldn’t honestly tell whether it was Steve Jobs, Michael Stipe or Pope Benedict XVI on stage. And it was only a matter of time before Apple’s media death squad identified the miscreants, revoked their press badge, and bundled them on to the Gulag Express without informing their next of kin.

Bingo and a raffle

Such nastiness is clearly alien to the members of the LMUG; a nicer bunch of people you honestly couldn’t hope to meet – listen to their cheery welcome, for Pete’s sake. This was more like a village fete than a technology keynote. There was real ale, a game of Buzzword Bingo (Clickity click, terabyte disks; Heaven’s alive, iOS 5), and a raffle organised by a woman who was old enough to be Steve Jobs’ mum. “The average age of our members is 68,” confided organiser Steve Naybour, which, given there was a 14-year-old developer at the back of the room, left me wondering if some of the members were still technically alive.

During the duller moments – of which there were plenty in a two-hour plus keynote – Steve (Naybour, not Jobs) would flick the audio to his wireless mic and canvas the audience’s thoughts on the evening’s announcements. iOS 5? Enthusiastic clapping. Mac OS X Lion for $30? Even louder enthusiastic clapping. Only available via the Mac App Store? Sucking of teeth. Tough crowd.

The presence of a PC magazine editor sitting quietly in the corner seemed to go relatively unnoticed, aside from some rather curious glances at my choice of hardware. Suffice to say that if armed robbers had raided the basement of the Wood Marylebone last night, they would have come away with 87 iPhones, 86 iPads and a Dell XPS M1330.

Only once did it threaten to turn even the mildest hint of ugly when Steve Jobs proudly announced the iPhone and iPad were going “PC free”, which was greeted with a huge cheer.

I took revenge when asked by Steve Naybour to sum up the evening’s events, and I told the (now rapidly depleting) audience that I thought Steve Jobs’ “demotion” of Mac OS X was bad news for the long-term prospects of the operating system. This was a bit like telling the Tufty Club the squirrel had just been run over; a standing ovation wasn’t forthcoming.

Nevertheless, we shook hands and agreed a good night had been had by all. The LMUG will be holding its next meeting on Monday. The topic? Security.  Macs don’t get viruses do they?

What really gets up my nostrils is that it was all so unnecessary, as proven by this video, which beautifully condenses the entire two-hour Jobs’ yawn fest into 60 seconds.

Next time I’m watching the keynote, rather than the football, highlights.