Frank skinner

We are all surely familiar with those stories of naive young Brits who travel abroad and are persuaded by a charming new holiday friend to bring back what they’re told is an innocuous package, only to end up on the sharp end of drugs smuggling charges. The latest series of the BBC’s World of Secrets somewhat inverts those expectations: it tracks the fortunes of three innocent young Brazilian sailors and a French captain who were allegedly duped by a Norwich businessman into sailing a rackety yacht across the Atlantic with £100 million worth of cocaine hidden in the body of the ship. ‘One thing you find on breakfast TV is

For a television talent show, Afghan Star had unusually high stakes. When it first hit Afghanistan’s screens in 2005, four years after the fall of the Taliban, it represented the triumph of music over those who had attempted to smother it. Even from the show’s somewhat chaotic inception, it galvanised a nation, sending supporters out on to the streets to canvas for their favourite performers. When the Taliban first swept into town, people were overjoyed: they were seen as ‘angels of peace’ The first winner, Shakib Hamdard, certainly deserved some luck: he had lost his father to a suicide bomb and his brother to a rocket attack, and was driving