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Isn’t it always the way? It’s only when you stop looking for something that you find it. Tom Binns has been beavering away at stand-up since the early 1990s. He was in BBC2’s ‘Fist of Fun’ with the young Stewart Lee and Richard Herring, and performed in Simon Munnery’s anarcho-circus ‘Cluub Zarathustra’. A move into radio followed, then telly – and two years ago, the big time (if not credibility) beckoned when he hosted the pilot for a revival of 1970s gameshow ‘Celebrity Squares’. But ‘Squares’ hit the skids, and a ‘gutted’ Binns jacked it all in to sail catamarans in Ibiza. ‘I’d had enough,’ he says. ‘It was a big disappointment.’
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And then, a year later, in August 2007, Binns was nominated for Britain’s most illustrious stand-up prize, the If.Comedy Award. Oh, the fickle finger of fate! Life on the ocean wave, you see, hadn’t really agreed with him. ‘When I was skippering people around the island,’ he says, ‘I spent most of my time entertaining them. And I realised that I’d get paid more for that if I didn’t have the catamaran.’ But all those years on TV had knocked Binns’ comedy confidence: ‘when you start broadcasting,’ he says, ‘your funny bones go. At [London radio station] Xfm, I wasn’t even allowed to laugh on air.’ How could he return to stand-up when, by his own admission, ‘the stand-up persona I’d developed for myself had totally gone’?

Step forward, Binns’ alter ego, the ‘cheerful earful’, Ivan Brackenbury. Binns created this spoof hospital radio DJ way back, but had never
given the character his own show. So, with nothing left to lose, Binns booked an Edinburgh slot for Brackenbury. The rest is comedy history. The critics (well, most of them) swooned; I found Ivan’s naff, gloriously tasteless audio roadshow the funniest thing on the Fringe. The awards nod was the thoroughly unexpected icing on the cake.

So what’s the moral of the story? Should all comedians quit stand-up to work in the tourist trade? Probably not: Binns’ story is unique, in more ways than one. He couldn’t take Ivan onstage before now ‘because it’s only recently you could rely on the technology to be able to do it’.

Brackenbury delivers his set from behind decks and a laptop, offering a demented collage of tunes, ‘wacky wind-ups’ and doctored jingles, all for the benefit of Ivan’s deluded ego and the patients of Chesterfield and North Derbyshire hospital. The main, fabulously cheap joke, repeated in endless variations, is that Ivan’s dedications to the sick and wounded are woefully inappropriate. ‘Jump’ by Van Halen for would-be suicides. Coldplay’s ‘Yellow’ for a jaundice sufferer. And for the man with a Spiderman toy trapped in his arse? ‘Search for the Hero Inside Yourself’.

The character was inspired by the ‘sweaty voiced’ broadcasters who manned the Care Line when Binns worked at a Nottingham radio station. Binns has the ingratiating, gormless vocal mannerisms just right. Likewise his kiddie-fiddler chic: Brackenbury sports an unattractive Steve Wright moustache, plus Timmy Mallett-issue baseball cap and an orange tracksuit. Just don’t tell Binns (as critics did) that this is too hackneyed an idea. ‘The most annoying criticism,’ he says, ‘is that Peter Kay and Steve Coogan had done this before. That bugged me, because I’ve been doing Ivan longer than both.’

Another gripe is that he’s often referred to as ‘DJ Tom Binns’. OK, so he has impressive radio and TV chops, ‘but I was always a comedian on the radio rather than a DJ’. He made the mistakes to prove it; in 1999, he was sacked from Xfm, having incurred the biggest fine in the history of local radio for discussing bestiality on a breakfast show phone-in. ‘It “beggared belief”, according to the Radio Authority,’ he says. ‘And that’s an actual quote.’ A happier memory comes from his period presenting Channel 4’s morning show ‘Ri:se’, when Binns was voted twenty-fifth sexiest man in the world (eight places ahead of George Clooney) by readers of More magazine, ‘which I think,’ he says now, ‘must stand for more prescription lenses for our readers’.

So the road to If.Comedy acclaim has been a crazy-paved one. Is Binns happy to be back in stand-up? Certainly, the catamaran business ‘has done very well without me. It’s had its best year ever’. And as for the performing career, well, ‘I’m really pleased at what’s happened,’ he says. ‘But equally, when I look at my diary for October, my heart sinks: “Oxford Monday, Newcastle Tuesday”– here we go again!’ The
almightiest gig, of course, is the If.Comedy showcase at the Garrick Theatre, which will be the biggest Ivan Brackenbury has ever played.

How will Binns explain the lowly hospital DJ’s presence in such a hallowed arena? ‘I might just ignore it,’ he says. ‘Ivan’s occasionally been on Channel 4 and on Chris Evans’ show, and there’s always a question mark over why he was there.’ Not that Binns is in any doubt. ‘He’s there,’ he says, ‘because I’ve got bills to pay.’

Ivan Brackenbury is at the Monday Club on Monday, Laugh at Ginglik on Tuesday, and at the Garrick Theatre on Oct 21.