NOTHING beats the buzz of stand-up for Jo Brand. It is in front of an audience that the comedian is in her element. In the live arena, she can let rip on all the subjects closest to her heart. She can also underline just why she has earned the tag of "the funniest woman in Britain."

"Stand-up is the thing that gives me the most pleasure," beams 48-year-old Jo, whose tour comes to the Beck Theatre in Hayes on May 18. "I love that feeling of connecting with people. Being on stage, you're talking directly to people without being mediated through TV or paper. The dialogue goes backwards and forwards between the audience and me. It's like a giant conversation - a big laugh with a group of friends."

Since her last stand-up jaunt round the country, she has been entertaining TV audiences on shows as diverse as Mock the Week, QI, Who Wants To Be a Millionaire, Have I Got News For You, Parkinson, Never Mind the Buzzcocks and Question Time.

Jo, who over the years has built up a very large and loyal live following, stresses: "I always try to be very polite and humorous when I meet members of the public. But people expect you to be exactly like your persona, even when you're in the chemist buying Tampax. It means that no aspect of your life is private.

"I'm way down the list of celebs - I can't imagine how Hollywood stars handle it. I suppose they cope by becoming strange and getting religion."

Jo goes on to talk about another subject close to her heart: stalking. "Next year, I'm going to write a novel about a celebrity stalker," says the comic, who is already a bestselling author. "I had a stalker, but he was very lazy and I never actually saw him in person. Nevertheless, I did feel anxious about it, and it must be very frightening to have a proper stalker."

It's a dark subject for a novel, I interject.

"I like a bit of dark," Jo chuckles.

In her new show, she will be discussing many other topics that are weighing on her mind. She is, for example, particularly vexed about why we all seem so vexed.

"Everybody is so angry these days," sighs Jo, who worked as a Registered Mental Nurse before becoming a comedian. "If you read the psychologist Oliver James, he gives an astute, down-to-earth analysis of this phenomenon. People can see what they could have. Sadly, most of them can't have it, but they still want it. "Look at Pop Idol - 75,000 people turn up for auditions. Most of them won't even get through the front door, but they still feel that they're entitled to be famous. They see ordinary people going on Big Brother and getting their own chat show and think 'I want one of those, too'.

"These days, it's presented to people that you can be anything you want to be. But that's dangerous because people have such high expectations, they're bound to be frustrated. They feel cheated because their lives aren't where they want them to be and they haven't got a big enough car or house."

Jo admits that once people laboured under a misconception about her.

"I used to be perceived in certain quarters as a man-hating separatist feminist. That was always a very simplistic analysis - 'she's making jokes about men, therefore she must be a man-hater'. That was assumed from every shade of the political spectrum. I'd get invitations for women-only gigs and go on stage and say, 'I want a husband', and the organisers' faces would fall. 'What's this? We've let in a heterosexual!' They'd fallen for the cliche.

"But thankfully that stereotype has gone now that I'm a mature mother of two who spends all her time at home polishing the hob. The perception shifted when I got married and had kids. People said, 'oh, she's not so bad after all. She's changed her sexual orientation and softened.'"

Jo is quick to correct this, however.

"I haven't softened," she says. "It's just that the issues in my life have changed. I want to say to people 'don't expect me to be what I'm supposed to be'. I want to confound expectations. That's a common trait in comedians."

Jo reckons that appearing on BBC1's What Not To Wear and giving as good as she got to Trinny and Susannah helped her slough off the old stereotyped tag. "That did me a huge amount of favours," the comedian confirms. "The general public wanted someone to have a go at Trinny and Susannah - that was very helpful for me. People came up to me afterwards and said 'well done for having a go at them'.

"Before then, the only other time that people had ever seen me was doing stand-up. But here they saw what I was really like and realised that I was actually quite normal: I was not a man-hating, heckler-consuming old bag."

Jo Brand's UK tour comes to the Beck Theatre in Hayes on May 18. For tickets, call 020 8561 8371.