Mail on Sunday

Drama of the Day

Pick of the Day ; Friday January 29

Latin Music USA BBC4, 9pm Far more than just a blast from the past for salsa lovers, this four-part social and cultural history of the development of Latin music in the US makes for a thoroughly comprehensive musical treasure trove. From Havana's Afro-Cuban son of the Twenties to the latest explosion of urban reggaeton, the Latin sound has consistently impacted on the American mainstream, but none more spectacularly than Santana's surprise storming of Woodstock in 1969. The band, led by Carlo...

Soap of the Day

Pick of the Day ; Thursday January 28

Girl With Eight Limbs Grows Up Channel 4, 10pm When Lakshmi Tatma (above) was born with four arms and four legs in a remote corner of India, she was celebrated as a goddess by her neighbours. However, her parents were anxious for her future and agreed to let their daughter undergo surgery to give her a more normal life. The operation landed the toddler on front pages around the world, but despite its successful outcome - Lakshmi can now walk independently and is enrolled in a charity school -...

Soap of the Day

Pick of the Day ; Saturday January 30

The Virtual Revolution BBC2, 8.30pm It's easy to forget just how quickly the internet has taken over so much of our daily routine, but as late as the Eighties, online communication was the preserve of the military, academics and Grateful Dead fans. Since then, as presenter Aleks Krotoski (above) relates in the opening part of her survey of the virtual universe, The Great Levelling?, the invention of the world wide web has seen the development of two very different trends.

'A Lot of People in This Country Hate Me. I Seem to Annoy People'

For someone who's just blown a couple of million pounds, Joss Stone has a pretty big smile on her face. The 22-year-old singer has finally settled her dispute with EMI, with whom she signed for Pounds 7.5 million three years ago. Blessed with a voice to rival Janis Joplin, the Devon girl with the habit of going barefoot was discovered on a talent show at the age of 14. 'Basically, I was a freak show,' she laughs. 'This kid with this big old voice. I was a travelling freak.' By 17 she'd scoope...

I Texted Dannii Minogue: 'My Maths Suggests You Conceived the Night of Our Chat?' 'There's a Chance You Might Be Right!' She Replied

WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 13 I've flown to South Beach in Miami for a few days' R&R before Britain's Got Talent auditions start up again. And discovered I'd had a narrow escape because my favourite irritant, Michael Winner, was here too, until two days ago. The last thing you need on holiday is a moaning, opinionated, obnoxious, rude celebrity. Particularly when you are one yourself... I lay back on the balcony of my sumptuous suite at the Ritz-Carlton, sipped an ice- cold beer, nibbled on a fresh c...

The Radio That Wants to Rock and Roll...

The Q2 Tip & Tilt is the first radio to do away with knobs, dials and even displays. Well, the first that works, anyway. The chunky, Lego bricklike machine - a cube measuring four inches on each side - tunes in to internet radio, and to select one of the four pre-set stations you simply turn the Tip & Tilt onto one of its four sides. The front houses the speaker and on the rear are sockets for headphones, set-up and charging. Inside the cube is an iPhone-style accelerometer that senses the gi...

The Secrets of My Success

Sir Ranulph Twistleton-Wykeham-Fiennes OBE, third baronet of Banbury - Ran, to his friends - was born in Glasgow in 1944. He served in the Royal Scots Greys before secondment to the SAS, where he saw combat in the Dhofar Rebellion, and later called on colleagues to lead the first team to reach both poles by land in 1979-82. A 2000 attempt to walk solo to the North Pole ended when he had to rescue his sled from freezing water, losing several fingers to frostbite. In 2003 he ran seven marathons...

Your Pc's Brave New World ; When It Comes to Computers, It's What's Inside That Counts. David Mccandless Reveals the Development of the World's Most Life- Changing Invention: The Chip

Computer design, software and graphics have all radically evolved over the years - but the real transformation in computers has been in the chips. There has been a massive leap in processors and their power. We had a computer in the house when I was eight in 1979 - a Sharp MZ80B. Then I had a Sinclair ZX Spectrum when I was 11. I used to hack into videogames so I could get infinite lives and walk through walls. I got pretty good at this (it was a serious intellectual buzz). That got me a colu...

Psst - Want to Buy a Second-Hand Italian Police Diver's Watch? ; You Could Invest in a Pounds 2,000 Spanking New Rolex. Or, You Could Go for a 'Vintage' Model (That's 'Used' to You and Me) with a Rich History of Its Own Live for Gadgets

The Watch Club in London's Old Bond Street is unlike any other watch shop - all its pieces are 'vintage', and are coveted by its customers for their amazing back stories, as these eight watches show to spectacular effect... 1. Only a few of these giant-sized A Lange & Sohne watches survived the war, thanks in no small part to the efforts of the RAF. The massive timepiece - the casing measures more than two inches - was issued to the Luftwaffe as a flight instrument, and was designed to be wor...

God Isn't Dead. You Just Have to Think Creatively ; Richard Dawkins Says Believers Are Deluded but, As One Celebrated (and Irreligious) Author and Broadcaster Argues, Atheists Are All Missing the Point - Apart From Anything Else, Without God There'd Be No Hamlet or Eastenders...

God is dead!' proclaimed the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche. Call it wishful thinking. More than a century later, God is still very much with us. In the last few years, The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins and God Is Not Great by Christopher Hitchens have topped the bestseller lists, with The Book Against God, The Impossibility Of God, Atheism: The Case Against God and countless other works of self-help atheism trailing in their rear. Their titles give the game away. God is a delusion,...

Speed of Light ; Bentley Continental Supersports

As I hand back yet another amazing car - a Bentley, no less - I wonder what it would look like if I lined up all the vehicles I've driven in my life. Would it stretch to the Moon and back, as these things always seem to? Probably not. Maybe to Swindon and back. I'd have to start with my earliest tricycle, then next to it my Raleigh Burner BMX - God, I loved that bike. Mag wheels, bunny-hop forks, superwide handlebars...I even had the special helmet and tracksuit thing as well. Third would com...

Drive Talking ; What's Hot On the Road This Week

FORD'S FUTURE IN VIEW The Detroit Motor Show ends today. Big story? Ford's bid to reclaim its place at the industry's top table with this, the 2011 Focus. It has a sleeker profile than the current Focus and gets a new two-litre direct injection petrol engine, and better suspension, cabin design and electronics. Sales start early next year.

How I Got the Bird ; Only a True Twitcher Would Spend Pounds 1,200 On a Pair of Binoculars... Which Is Why Comic Bill Bailey Is Just the Man to Test Two of the Latest Lightweight Pairs Guestreview

My earliest memories are of family outings with my parents, grandparents and maybe a couple of cousins. We'd go for walks round a reservoir near Bristol and I'd have various species of waterbird pointed out to me. As I got older my dad would take me a bit further afield to Slimbridge, a wetland reserve founded by Peter Scott, and he'd lend me his Carl Zeiss binoculars. Birdwatching gave a purpose to the day and that philosophy has carried on into my adult life. Down the years I've had various...

Nag's Head Revisited

Only Fools And Horses is the nation's favourite sitcom, according to a 2004 poll, and attracted Britain's biggest comedy audience of all time in 1996 (even more than Steptoe & Son in the Sixties) with 24 million viewers. Its stars, David Jason and Nicholas Lyndhurst, will be forever associated with their loveable characters, dodgy dealer Del Boy Trotter and his young brother Rodney. In fact, its fans are so keen there are probably some still refusing to give up VHS until they've worn out thei...

Encounters of Any Old Kind

I Believe In UFOs: Danny Dyer Tuesday, BBC3, 9pm UFOs. You either believe in them or you don't. Hardman actor and professional Cockney Danny Dyer definitely does believe in them. But he's not alone. At the start of his quest to find an alien life form, Dyer visits astronomical star Sir Patrick Moore who concurs, though he hopes that they won't visit our planet just yet. 'If aliens came only a relatively short time ago, they'd have found no intelligent life. And I'm not sure they'd find any now.'

Film

BOLT SUNDAY DISNEY CINEMAGIC, 4.30PM In this Disney animation, heroic TV dog Bolt - voiced by John Travolta - soon learns that his superpowers are fake when he is accidentally shipped away. SUMMER TUESDAY BBC2, 11.20PM The fragility of friendship is explored in this thoughtful Scottish drama, starring Robert Carlyle as Shawn, a man who cares for his wheelchair-using mate and whose flashbacks remind him why.

Tv Highlights

THE BIBLE: A HISTORY SUNDAY CHANNEL 4, 7PM 'Non-practising Jew' Howard Jacobson examines the good book, in a polemic that is as much a championing of the work's 'intellectual beauty' as it is a retort to the 'fervent atheists' who have caricatured religion for their own arguments. 24 SUNDAY SKY1 (HD), 9PM Day eight of the real-time drama sees the action move to New York and the plot return to its roots, centring on an assasination attempt which forces Jack Bauer out of retirement for one fina...