Part TED talk, part psychic extravaganza, Tom Binns’ extrasensory expert Ian D Montfort is back at the festival and he’s determined to convince the sceptics the dead are among us and he can touch them. In doing so he offers up an hour of hilarious comical clairvoyance.
Binns maintains a masterful control of the stage throughout the show.
The softly-spoken Sunderland psychic bookends the show with an explanation of clairvoyance. It’s a funny, light-hearted way of kicking off a show which quickly transforms into more familiar faux-spiritualist territory. Audience members are singled out as Binns receives messages from the other side, messages which are scrawled down into impressively awful drawings.
The comedian unerringly reveals the secrets of these audience members, answering their questions and offering riotously bleak outlooks on the future of lives and relationships. Both his psychic hits and misses are equally funny and there is a particularly strong sequence during which Binns deftly shows the depth and range of his psychic ability, touching not only dead people but animals too.
Binns maintains a masterful control of the stage throughout the show. He is so at home in his character that he greets everything coming his way with measured and unfailingly funny responses. The comedian takes the familiarly ludicrous performances of TV mediums and pushes the unintentionally funny into side-splitting territory, often garnering psychic results which are more impressive than the shysters peddling this stuff as real.
“You’ve got plenty of time,” shouts one audience member when Binns checks his watch towards the end of his show. Sadly it wasn’t true but there wasn’t a person in the audience who wouldn’t have enjoyed a much longer performance – even those troublesome sceptics. Such a sentiment is high and deserved praise to a performer who delivers a terrifically entertaining comedy show.
