Tom Binns

Brand new comedy festival in Middlesbrough in July

The bill features a line up of some instantly recognisable names so far, with more expected to be revealed shortly.

The Comedy Playhouse first aired on the BBC in 1961 and offered an anthology series of comedy programmes, all of which were separate and unique. It was a showcase for new comedy and some of the programmes were snapped up and turned into now much-loved famous series, such as Steptoe and Son and Are You Being Served?

The Comedy Playhouse ended in the 1970s but made a return in 2014, and its latest outing began on Friday night with Hospital People.

How rare it was to laugh at Friday night BBC One comedy and I can only cross my fingers and hope a BBC executive somewhere has plans to grab this show and make turn it into a full series.

Playing everyone from an alternative therapy-obsessed porter to a chaplain who'd rather be a comedian, Tom Binns takes on multiple parts in a mockumentary pilot charting life at the fictional Brimlington Hospital. It's nowhere near edgy enough, but there are some good gags nonetheless. Manager Susan Mitchell discusses MRSA rates: "If you come into this hospital with a heart condition, you're going to die of a heart condition, not pick up a secondary infection along the way."

Hosptial People review

Hospital People has plenty of nice lines, although it falls between a sketch show and a sitcom, not quite having enough plot to justify the latter, beyond the general threat of creeping commercial interests. That's a timely theme, but having a more specific plot would certainly benefit Hospital People were it picked up for a series. Here's hoping, for the deadpanned innuendos could fill a big slot.

TV review: Hospital People, BBC1

A new series of pilots kicks off with a medical comedy as sharp as a scalpel, brutally putting Jeremy Hunt and the NHS under the microscope. Actually no. Hospital People is more Carry On Nurse without the nurses and slightly misses a trick by not being particularly political. It is set in a fictional hospital and does at least touch on creeping NHS privatisation, but the main laughs are broad. And there are plenty of them.

I'll be honest with you: I usually dread writing Friday's TV previews because we all know there's only one thing worse than Friday night TV and that's Saturday night TV. So it's never easy finding decent things to watch tonight; BBC Four can often be trusted to show a nice music documentary but BBC One is practically a no-go zone.

But tonight that changes because of Hospital People and let me tell you how much I enjoyed it!

It's a mock-documentary set in the fictional Brimlington Hospital, and actor Tom Binns plays most of the characters. There's the hospital chaplain who fancies himself as a zany Scouse comedian, treating his ailing congregation to awful stand-up comedy sermons. The Hospital Radio DJ, Ivan, is a desperate middle-aged man, still seeking fame in his little booth, and says he likes being challenged by his job - he wants to wake up every day and shout, "I'm mentally challenged!" And there's a hypochondriac patient telling the doctors there are things they don't get taught in medical school and he's surely got one of them things!

It's wacky, clever and funny - and it's Friday night. I can hardly believe it!

Interview: Tom Binns

Tom Binns is the award-winning creator of celebrated comic characters such as hapless local radio DJ Ivan Brackenbury and psychic Ian D Montfort.

Tom Binns has a bit of previous on the radio. He was fired by a local radio station for dissing the Queen's Speech in 2009. Ten years earlier, Tony Blair's apparatchiks tried to have Binns sacked from Xfm for dissing New Labour (a badge of honour for any comedian).

His most recent work should garner awards rather than sackings. In Ian D Montfort Is: Unbelievable, his alter ego is a psychic from Sunderland, working with a live audience, and it's terrific stuff. He's nailed that fishing-for-detail schtick upon which mediums rely. At one point he senses a spirit on stage with him: "He wants to connect with a gentleman here tonight who's been watching some kind of sports, maybe in the summer of 2012 ..." (Long pause - he's an absolute master of the long pause.) "I've got, like, a big athletics meeting, or swimming, possibly."

Some proper Derren Brown-style stunts were hardly necessary - he's just very funny. He does politics, too, noting that in the US £3bn is spent on psychic services every year. "If this stuff's not real that's an awful lot of people being scammed," he mused. "I don't think the Americans are that stupid, do you? Or easily led." Pause. "Or if they were, the world would be in a right mess."