Mail on Sunday

The Insider

SUNDAY, OCTOBER 25 I'm woken in Shanghai by an email from Lord Alan Sugar pointing out that he has, inexplicably, beaten Moses and Mother Teresa in a Prince's Trust survey of young people asking them to name the World's Greatest Leaders, only trailing Martin Luther King, Barack Obama and Nelson Mandela. As you can imagine, his modesty at this absurd result knows no start.

Top Ten Entertainment Releases This Week

FILM] TAKING WOODSTOCK Light but warm-hearted entertainment about the staging of the giant Woodstock festival: three days of peace and music - and mud. GAME] LITTLE BIG PLANET Build 2D levels, then jump around as a boy with a sack for a head. Better than it sounds. PSP BOX SET] TERMINATOR: THE SARAH CONNOR CHRONICLES After Terminator 2, Sarah Connor jumps into the future to be stalked by more robots from her past (and future).

Try Some Aroma Therapy ; Live for Wine

Aromatic whites... You might not be buying them because their names are hard to say, come from obscure places or the labels don't give much of an idea of what to expect. However, if you know what to seek, wines in this style are a bit like The Secret Millionaire, tucked away on the shelves waiting for you to get close... with no hint of the hidden riches on offer. Aromatic white grapes come in all shapes and sizes, from full-on floral belters such as Gewurztraminer to those with a more subtle...

Dinner Is Poured ; No Thank You Darling, I Won't Have a Drink with Our Meal (You Haven't Seen What I've Chucked Into It Already...)

For some men, cooking with beer means little more than starting the microwave while cradling a bottle of Becks. Or chugging Stella during a shift on the barbecue. Not that there's anything remotely wrong with lager-assisted cooking. But for too long, beer has been seen as an inferior ingredient to wine. While the latter provides the soul of many a sauce, stew or gravy, beer is viewed as the rather backward cousin, bullish and ungainly, better suited to the pint glass than the cast-iron pot. S...

Sharpen Up Your Act in the Kitchen

TAYLORS EYE WITNESS CLASSIC CHANTRY Pounds 23. Used in the meat processing industry as well as being one of the permanent exhibits in New York's MOMA, this classic is the perfect balance of function and form. KITCHEN DEVILS ROLLSHARP Pounds 6. For such a relatively budget price you get an efficient ceramic blade (that works best on thinner knives) and a lightweight tool you can leave in the diswasher.

Brydon Prejudice ; He Was Rejected From Rada for Being Too Provincial and Told He Had a Face Made for Voice-Overs (for Toilet Duck). How Did Rob Brydon Fight Back? Two Words: Uncle Bryn

Rob Brydon has a good body. That's the makeup lady's conclusion as he performs six or seven quick-changes in front of her for Live's photoshoot. It was also the basis of a gag in the second series of Gavin & Stacey, in which Brydon, as Uncle Bryn, works out topless in his home gym, encouraging co-star James Corden to strip off and join in. But there's something... suspicious about it. Described by many as 'the politest man in showbusiness', 44-year- old Brydon's avuncular persona doesn't go w...

The Machinery of War ; an Arms Factory Shouldn't Be in the Business of Beauty. But There Is Something Curiously Aesthetic About the Materiel Crafted in Britain's Three Remaining Munitions Plants for Our Afghan Campaign - Bullets and Bombs Made in an Old-Fashioned Way for a Decidedly Old- Fashioned War Reportage

The 'Danger Area' at BAE Systems Glascoed does not feel particularly dangerous. Many of the buildings are derelict. Starlings sit undisturbed on lightning conductor wires. Below them a grid plan of roads is deserted. Occasionally a sudden jet of steam blasts from a valve hanging down from the silver piping that crisscrosses the site. Otherwise all is as suitably low-key as you might expect from a sheltered 1,000-acre site that didn't feature on Ordnance Survey maps at all 30 years ago; today ...

Fancy a Spin? ; Sizzling Subarus, Daring Donuts and Life-Size Hot Wheels... Simon Lewis Discovers Top Gear Live'snext Trick - They're Going Round the World...

In an empty hangar the size of an indoor football pitch, producer Rowland French is running through the stage directions for Top Gear Live 2009, currently thrilling audiences on its world tour. It's an undertaking as complicated and almost as dangerous as a medium- sized tank battle. A Ford Focus RS, a Toyota Supra, a Golf GTI, a Toyota Swift, a Porsche 911 Turbo and several Subarus are idling at the room's edges, while a Dodge Viper is doing donuts in the centre. The smell of petrol and eau ...

This Week's Must-Have, Must-See, Must-Do

THE GADGET We don't yet have jet-packs, but sometimes the 21st century lives up to our hi-tech dreams. Take the Gear4 SoundOrb, an iPod dock with a subwoofer that glows and flicks through 10,000 colours. Once that starts to drive you mad (two days in, we'd guess), you can switch it to one colour (or off), leaving it as a white lump. Pounds 250, gear4.com

Better Late Than Never

Rob Brydon: why he's proof that if you really want to be famous, try, try and try again. Plus, inside Britain's bomb factories... doing the loop-the-loop for Top Gear Live... cooking with your favourite ale... and the latest miniature movie projectors

When All the World's a Rom-Com ; They May Involve Bridal Showers, Weddings and Nauseatingly Cute Pets - but Romantic Comedies Are Man's Greatest Guilty Pleasure

Whenever I fly across the Atlantic, there are various rituals I always look forward to. Ritual One involves the businessman directly in front of me who, despite having passed through airport security at least four times a week for the past ten years, chooses today to have a hissy fit because he doesn't want to take off his shoes. Then there is the sight of the infrequent flyer who, having pooh- poohed the offer of an instructional display from a kindly trolley dolly, can be seen wrestling wit...

It's a Man's World ; David Haye

DAVID HAYE David 'Hayemaker' Haye this month triumphed over 7ft 2in Russian Nikolai Valuev (in a fight dubbed 'David vs Goliath') to become the British heavyweight boxing champion of the world - and an overnight multimillionaire. Now 29, he's expected to defend his title against the American John Ruiz next year. A significant proportion of my wardrobe is now redundant. I bulked up so much for my fight against Valuev. Since I moved from cruiserweight to heavyweight I've gone from 14st to 17st ...

Oh, Miss Jones ; ... Go On Then Norah, Do Tell Us All About Jude Law Licking Your Face for Three Days in the Name of Art (and Why You're More Than Happy to Be Called Attractive)

Singer-songwriter Norah Jones rocketed to fame at the age of 22, with her debut album Come Away With Me grabbing five Grammys on one night in 2003. Six years on, she's sold 36 million records worldwide, and is about to release her fourth album, which combines a rougher, more contemporary sound with her trademark jazz vocals. Jones is the daughter of legendary Indian sitar player Ravi Shankar but was raised in Texas by her mother, Sue Jones. She now lives in New York.

It's the End of the World As We Know It ; Cheaper, Better, Sharper. Still Think a Projector Is an Overly Involved Home-Cinema Choice? Let Us Put You in the Picture

These tiny projectors throw an image up to 42 inches across, and plug into anything from an iPhone to a home entertainment system. But before you hurl your HD flatscreen into the skip that so recently held your old 'fat-back' TV, we should point out that these 'Pico projectors' are more suited for life in bedrooms rather than prime time in your living room. Most aren't hi-def. Many won't work unless you shut all the curtains - and often World War IIstyle blackouts are recommended. What they d...

The New Superpower ; Cadillac Cts-V What? An American Car That's As Fast As a Ferrari and Comfy As a Merc? This Could Be a Whole New Special Relationship...

Can you judge a country by the car its leaders choose? If so, we're a Jaguar XJ - the Cabinet's traditional choice, a luxury saloon that's so good, Mandelson's got two (presumably Prescott had a spare one). Jaguar's a good fit for England: it combines traditional values with high technology, projects quiet power, was bought by Americans in 1989 and is now owned by a foreign billionaire. I can't think of anything more appropriate. A German- owned Mini would feel wrong (albeit a lot of fun) and...

Top Tens

UK SINGLES 1 Everybody In Love JLS

Film of the Day

Soap of the Day

Pick of the Day

Andrew Marr's The Making Of Modern Britain BBC2, 9pm The Jazz Age makes for a glittering contrast to the horrors of war, detailed last week, and Marr (top) creates a vivid picture of the new-found freedom - and decadence, for a privileged few - of Twenties Britain, from the radical lifestyles of the Bloomsbury set to the exciting new innovation of the nightclub. However, this was also an era of tumult and social tension: in Ireland, the struggle for independence gave way to bloody civil war, ...

Choice

SPORT Live Rugby Union Special Sky Sports 2 (HD), 7.25pm