Modern pesticides are related to nerve gas - do we really want them on our veggies?Maff automatically owns

Modern pesticides are related to nerve gas - do we really want them on our veggies?Maff automatically owns any cow that has BSE, and won't allow anyone else to do tests on diseased tissue. A carpenter who had the bad luck to live beside a field of brussels sprouts when it was sprayed with pesticides has suffered from chronic fatigue syndrome ever since. A doctor was interviewed who thinks we won't know for 20 or 30 years whether the general population has been affected; but she is already seeing an increase in neurological disease in farmers. Instead, Purdey traces the disease back to a 1986 Maff directive telling farmers to use a high-dosage organo-phosphate pesticide on their cattle, in order to eradicate the warble fly parasite. The chemical seeps through the skin and enters the bloodstream - and so, Purdey believes, the brain - of the cow. The effect of pesticides on the nervous system is cumulative. As Purdey pointed out, this feed has been exported elsewhere with no ill effects BSE is a purely British misfortune. And 20,000 cows born after the feed ban have gone down with it.

He dismisses Maff's explanation of mad cow disease - BSE - which they blame on meat-based feed infected with scrapie. In Frontline (C4), organic dairy farmer Mark Purdey attributed all manner of trouble, from mad cows to Parkinson's Disease, to the widespread (and Government-endorsed) use of pesticides on British farms. This is thanks to Maff, the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food, which seems not only indirectly to have caused the problem, but is also busy trying to cover it up, no doubt for fear of a million law-suits. ER, I DON'T want to worry you, but we may all be eating our way toward neurological disorders. 'Stop Calling Me Vernon': Lyric, W6 (0181 741 2311), to 14 Oct.. Hamish McColl and Sean Foley's beautifully designed and impeccably performed show turns the spotlight on a hard-pressed vaudeville double act and doubles Bottom's gag-count in half the time-span. The slapstick violence has an impressively authentic feel to it too: by the end of the night the stage is awash with blood, sweat and custard.'Bottom': Bournemouth Int'l Centre (01202 297297), tonight; Portsmouth Guildhall (01705 824355), Mon; then touring to 20 Dec.

But by the end of the prison scene, you know how Rik Mayall is supposed to feel when he says, "I wish I hadn't eaten the contents of the slop bucket".The Right Size's Stop Calling Me Vernon has taken a year to get down to London after a much lauded debut at Edinburgh in 1994, but has lost none of its freshness. It is quite possible that towards the end of the run their performances will be sounding a genuinely psychotic note.At the moment there are just a couple of moments of authentic tastelessness - most notably when Edmondson describes an exploding bathroom-hygiene product as being "from the ethnic end of the cleansing spectrum" - and things liven up a bit in the second half when Mayall starts to forget his lines and his partner threatens to "do a Stephen Fry" on him. Mayall and Edmondson are going to be repeating the line "Hobnob?" "No I've got an ordinary one" to a different packed house every night until Christmas. There is no getting away from the fact that Mayall and Edmondson have civilised hotel rooms to go home to afterwards.If the essence of comedy is - as inveterate Viz-reader Sigmund Freud suggested - "the awakening of the infantile", then Bottom might seem to have it taped, but there is something depressingly grown-up and routine about the sheer scale of this tour. But the sense of enclosure and degradation you get out of the little box in the corner of the room just does not come across in a theatre. Comedy luminaries of the calibre of Vic Reeves & Bob Mortimer and the writers of Father Ted are happy to speak highly of it. And yet, puerile, childish and obsessed with bodily functions as it is, there is something strangely not funny about the live Bottom experience. The explosions are excellent, the sadism is neatly choreographed, and the set of this two-hour stage show reproduces the squalor of the television tableau in meticulous detail.