Tom Binns Does Ivan Brackenbury and Others

Tom Binns opens by announcing his new character: the generic, adequate comic Tom Binns. And you have to say that he nails this character because his opening twenty minutes is indeed quite generic and perfectly adequate. A former TV warmup man, he's warm and unthreatening and keeps the audience on his side without posing a risk to the integrity of anyone's bladder.

He perhaps stays a little too long and risks warming down the audience, but just in time he's replaced by Ivan Brackenbury, a Timmy Mallet-style hospital DJ who's gone to the Alan Partridge school of tact. There is basically one joke here: Ivan gives a shout out to someone in the hospital who's suffering from a terrible affliction, then plays a song that's horribly innappropriate, such as dedicating Van Halen's Jump to a patient who's on suicide watch on the fifth floor.

It's too fast-paced to ever get boring though, and part of the fun is trying to guess the punchline based on the musical intros. Written in 2006, this is a tight show that Binns obviously knows inside-out, without a single misstep in his many musical cues. The only change is that he occasionally breaks out of character to point out that his 7-year old Jimmy Savile jokes have turned out to be spookily accurate. How did he know... [Bernard O'Leary]