Ivan Brackenbury’s Hospital Radio Roadshow

Published Monday 13 August 2007 at 11:00 by Chris Wilson

Tom Binns has created a powerful club act with his spoof hospital radio host Ivan Brackenbury. It truly is a fail-safe twenty-minute turn. Stretched out to a full hour, however, the cracks started to appear, and its flaws became all too obvious.

In essence, it is a two-joke show. Joke One: Brackenbury mentions a listener’s medical condition and plays a wholly inappropriate track. Joke Two: He plays a supposed endorsement by a famous person in which the name Ivan Brackenbury has been crudely dubbed on.

Other than these conceits, everything else was side salad. Not surprisingly, after twenty minutes or so the audience began to tire of it. The second joke is not especially funny anyway. The first is a corker but still wanes with repetition.

Binns is a good performer but has failed to make Brackenbury three-dimensional. The addition of a malicious medical student as his assistant flopped through its inconsistency. If Brackenbury could not perceive the inappropriateness of the CDs he was playing, how come he could see it with the Princess Diana medley compiled by his sidekick? It made no sense.

Ivan Brackenbury is potentially a great character act but much more imagination needs to go into its development.