Listen to Ivan Brackenbury (and Alan Carr and Mark Watson) on our Just Comedy podcast

Ivan Brackenbury is a soft target, hit 20 years too late. He’s also the funniest thing I’ve seen so far at this year’s Fringe. That’s not because this moustachioed, whiny-voiced character act from Chesterfield is saying anything new about radio DJs and their jaunty jingles: yes, they’re terminally naff, we know. But it’s not what you say, it’s the way that you say it. And seedy, stupid Ivan performs with pace and panache, aided by just enough structure and surprises to ensure that he doesn’t fade out before his hour is up.

Looming over his mobile entertainment unit in T-shirt and orange baseball cap, Ivan’s prime gag is to play the least suitable records possible for the listeners to his Disease Hour. For the hospital’s bulimics? Moloko, Bring it Back. For “Paul, with jaundice”? Coldplay, Yellow. You get the idea. But everything races along: for a terminal incompetent, Ivan is actually a very proficient DJ.

The disparity between Ivan’s Eighties stylings and his contemporary surroundings is part of the joke. So too is the clever way he’s given himself an antagonist, a medical student called Tom, who bridles at Ivan’s bumptiousness. Most important, though, is the sheer facility with which he jumps between his set-pieces. The morbidity of the hospital setting, too, keeps things from geting too cosy.

Ivan is the creation of Tom Binns, 37, a comic who has also worked as a TV host and, yes, as a radio DJ. That might explain how he managed to rope the voices of James Blunt and Simon Bates into this glorious tribute to mediocrity. The fluent timing, too, shows off his broadcasting skills.

But where other comics might burden Ivan with a spurious backstory or psychological quirks, Binns just lets him get on with being brilliantly, beautifully bad. You won’t learn anything here. You’ll do better than that. You’ll spend an hour glorying in the stupid ways we find to keep ourselves amused, and then you’ll leave, still chuckling at them.

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