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Going ga ga for spoof DJ

Angela Kelly
10/ 9/2008

WHEN ex-radio DJ Tom Binns metamorphosed into hospital radio DJ Ivan Brackenbury to steal the plaudits at last year’s Edinburgh Festival it was the ‘triumph of the nerd’.

Binns’ creation of a geeky presenter, fiercely proud of his Disease Hour, playing wildly inappropriate songs for Wayne with piles on Ward 5 and little Leanne with a broken leg, proved massively popular.

This year, Binns and Brackenbury returned to Edinburgh, hoping to capitalise on the award-winning success there and taking the amateur DJ’s life on a bit further.

"Yes, he is growing up a bit now, and his life is changing," explained Binns in between gigs in Cardiff and Liverpool just prior to a month of shows at the festival.

Binns is already something of a legend in radio. Born and brought up in Sheffield, he started life as a reporter on Radio Nottingham and worked for a variety of radio stations including Radio 1, Virgin, BRMB, Key 103 and the BBC.

But it was his time with London-based Xfm that put him into the record books for all the wrong reasons.

His language during a discussion with a listener about a bestial pornography video resulted in complaints to Ofcom and a £50,000 fine for the radio station – the watchdog’s largest at the time.

"My language did used to be a bit colourful", he admitted. "I would get fired on a regular basis.

"It’s funny because as Ivan I can now do lots of things I couldn’t do as me. I put on the baseball cap and the headphones and anything goes."

Binns is also a very talented writer who has penned comedy for Jamie Theakston and Lily Savage.

He appeared on a variety of TV shows including Knowing Me, Knowing You with Alan Partridge, Friday Night Armistice and a couple of pilot shows, and even acted in spy series Spooks last year.

But it wasn’t until he revived the hopeless hospital radio DJ that he really broke into the mainstream psyche.

"Ivan has been around for quite a while but I really only started developing the character about two years ago," Binns explained.

"This became easier with the improvement in computers because before that I either had to rely on a radio engineer to cue the sounds or only do the show on radio."

Binns’s act as Ivan is all about taking requests from patients and using excruciating and hilariously unsuitable record choices (like Jump for the girl with the broken leg, or Itchycoo Park for a patient suffering from psoriasis).

Ivan also does ‘live’ interview with patients and gets celebrity endorsements from people like Louise Redknapp who states that she "listens to Ivan Brackenbury every week on his Disease Hour".

Perhaps Ivan is not quite as geeky as the audience is led to believe as his response to Louise’s pleasant endorsement is "and I’m not even real."

"Ivan is actually much more intelligent than he appears," stated Binns. "He is aware of what is happening to him and he has grown.

"He has a history – he used to visit his mother in hospital until she died.

"He got involved in hospital radio through visiting her and just carried on.

"There’s now a wonderful juxtaposition between the music that’s supposed to make the patients feel good, and the fact that some are dying of various awful things. It’s quite a dark area, really."

The story was set to develop at Edinburgh as his show was under threat from hospital management who have warned him about the number of cock-ups and inappropriate stunts.

The audiences will, no doubt, love this latest storyline, just as they howl with laughter at Ivan’s musical choices.

As for Binns, a greater adrenaline rush comes at the end of the show when he takes "illness requests" from the audience which test his repertoire of selected music.

"I just never know when to stop, though," he said. "The result is that I just wait until there’s an illness I’ve got no music for and go out on a low."

Perhaps, however, that’s a fitting finale for Ivan Brackenbury.

Tom Binns as Ivan Brackenbury is at the Lowry on Saturday, 13 September at 8pm. For tickets call 0870 787 5780 or visit www.thelowry.com.