Software Review

Jo Brand is a mistress of the put-down, leaving her adoring but nervous audience in no doubt who's in charge

She's loud, proud and dangerous to heckle, Donna McPhail eats hostile audience members for breakfast - with the initials DM, she's well-equipped to give troublemakers a verbal kicking to remember

Sir: We call upon the Home Secretary to have compassion for the Onibiyo family, currently blighted by deportation.

I was pleased to see Janet McTeer win an award in the US for her role in A Doll's House. I saw it in London and it restored my faith in West End theatre, which can be so unpredictable. Rave reviews don't necessarily mean anything. Another production I saw recently, described as "devastating", was the biggest load of old tosh I have sat through for a long time. A few actors off the telly and a lot of hype do not a devastating production make; and critics are not always right, even if they are convinced they are.

Sir: Although I look forward to Jo Brand's entertaining comments, I must take issue with her over her statement on domestic service (24 May).

The good burghers of leafy, stockbroker-friendly Guildford are looking forward to the charms of David Essex crooning such genteel classics as "We're Going to Make You a Star" at their Civic Hall soon. So they might have been expected to choke into their Amontillados at the very thought of Jo Brand, the oversized, Struwel-Peter-coiffed, foul-mouthed flagellator of all the things they hold dear: maleness, Toryness, suburbanness. Her act, which she performed there on Wednesday night as part of her national tour, contains more swearing and sexual references than the entire work of Tarantino and Cronenberg put together.

In the 16th century, the prophet Nostradamus wrote: "The present time, together with the past, shall be judged by a great jovialist."

Men are getting fatter faster than women, discovers Emma Cook, and they don't like it

Look what's happened. A Labour landslide, goodbye to the Tories and the dawn of a new era, which leads me to wonder how comics are going to deal with the next five years and tackle the characters who will make up our new government. Well, many comics will be doing what they have always done, which is to ignore politics altogether. Popular television comedy these days, with the exception of a few like Rory Bremner and Mark Thomas, shies away from any political stance at all. The Day Today, Mrs Merton, French and Saunders and Alan Partridge all keep it shut as far as political opinion is concerned, which is probably why they are on big telly channels.

Abuse flourishes in silence

After 25 years I have been driven from my career by MBAs whose priority is management systems, not providing a service

Sir: Jo Brand (column, 29 March) must lead a very sheltered life. In this part of the country, the generation brought up with "officers' ladies, NCOs' wives, and other ranks' women", would be likely to give a very frosty reception to Jo Brand if she referred to any woman other than as a "lady", whereas the same word would make their daughters squirm. It's hell, I tell you.

Jo is away in Spain, and I know that this time it is Madrid rather than Malaga and the Prado rather than the Pizzeria. She has persuaded The Independent to trust me with the column, thus enabling me to realise journalistic ambitions that were early, but short-lived. This week's struggle for words has identified that writing is a darn sight more demanding than listening and talking, those essential social work skills.