Ian D Montfort Is: Unbelievable

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."

Sunderland psychic Ian D Montfort - the comic creation of Tom Binns - is back with a vengeance, not to mention some troubled spirits from the other side.

Simultaneously taking the mickey out of celebrity psychics he also practises the same astonishing techniques as Derren Brown. I cannot fathom how Binns manages to land upon such exact readings of the audience, but he does it with a deliciously dark wit.

Ian D Montfort Is: Unbelievable (Thursday, 9.30pm, R2) continues radio's long-running affair with illusion, a world in which you'd think it would have no business. Montfort calls himself a "celebrity spirit medium". He also calls himself "Britain's first spokesman for the pseudo sciences", which deliberately implies that the BBC management has "complied" his act within an inch of its life. "The production team have not altered the sense of what was experienced by the live audience in any way," promises an opening voiceover. When he's funny it doesn't really matter whether you believe him.

Ian D Montfort finds man who is 'back from the dead'

Comedy psychic Ian D Montfort stunned an room when he identified a man in his audience who had died and come back to life.

Tom Binns is perhaps most famous for his hospital radio DJ character Ivan Brackenbury, however this Radio 2 pilot focuses on his other comic creation: Ian D. Montfort, the Sunderland Psychic ("not to be confused with the Sunderland Psycho").

Binns' character is a parody of just about every TV psychic you've ever come across, complete with lame explanations of how his powers come about. Take Montfort's explanation of how angel cards work: "They're angel cards, that's how they work."

Due to the nature of the character, most of the laughs comes from interaction with his audience, and in this pilot his special guest, Melanie Sykes. Look out for the scenes in which he tries to embarrass the crowd...

Binns' characters are impressive, but can one, or even two, of his personas carry a whole radio series? Given the positive feedback to this pilot we might just find out...