ScotsGay Magazine

****

“We’re broadcasting live from three containers at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival 2007” - Ivan Brackenbury tells his audience back at Chesterfield Hospital and the crowd (us) gives a suitably enthusiastic cheer for this Disease Hour Roadshow that’s more of a car crash. Hospital Radio has never been cool - a hotbed of discontentment for wannabe radio celebrities showing off to a largely mute audience with only their own enthusiasm for company, but it’s always ripe for inappropriate and distasteful gags. It’s not a new concept: Radio 4’s Radio Active show did this kind of satire back in the 1980’s, but when it’s done well, the ineptitude and silliness of such a set up makes for plenty of wicked giggles and, to that end, Ivan Brackenbury is the thick man’s Alan Partridge. Plenty of the jokes rest on the inappropriateness of the song lyric to a patient’s condition. The playlist is endless. Feeling suicidal? “Jump” by Van Halen. Trouble with self-harm? Rod Stewart’s “First Cut Is The Deepest”. What saves the show from ever-decreasing returns of laughter is the sheer rate at which these gags come and the interweaving of cleverly thought out set pieces: - the wind-up phone call that ends in tragedy, the oldest patient in the hospital being left to wait on the line for a little too long. But the real stars are the expertly recorded four-part harmony jingles that redefine the concept of naff. This guy really knows his Simon Bates from his Dave Lee Travis so while the show is beautifully sick and slick it’s also engagingly daft. For a drizzly afternoon in the Pleasance Courtyard, this spoof show is just the tonic to appeal to that cruel naughty schoolboy streak that is so evident in what some of us like to term gay sensibility.

Andrew Simmons

Back to Fringe Review Index