Max & Ivan writing sport comedy for ITV2
- Max Olesker and Ivan Gonzalez are writing a sport-based comedy for ITV2
- The duo are writing six episodes of Deep Heat with Andrew Ellard
Max & Ivan are making a sport-based comedy for ITV2, British Comedy Guide can exclusively reveal.
The narrative sketch duo, Max Olesker and Ivan Gonzalez, are writing six 30-minute episodes of Deep Heat with prolific script editor Andrew Ellard, whose credits include Red Dwarf, The IT Crowd, Chewing Gum and Detectorists.
The comedy, which has been in development for three years, is being made by Episodes star Stephen Mangan's production company Slam Films and his brother-in-law, writer-producer-director Robert Delamere, who last year executive produced Max & Ivan's podcast Fugitives.
The satirical comedy-thriller featured an all-star supporting cast that included Mangan, Adam Buxton, Alice Lowe, Gemma Whelan, US stand-up Kyle Kinane and Lazy Susan's Celeste Dring and Freya Parker.
Gonzalez also appeared in Bleak House Guest, a 2019 comedy directed by Delamere and made by Slam Films for Sky Arts's strand of Urban Myth shorts, which starred Mangan as Charles Dickens, Monica Dolan as his long-suffering wife Catherine and Ian Hart as the melancholic Hans Christian Andersen.
Details of Deep Heat's plot have yet to be revealed. However, Gonzalez and former professional grappler Olesker, who played useless digital strategists Ben and Jerry in W1A, have hosted a series of popular wrestling shows between comedians at recent Edinburgh Fringes.
The duo's Radio 4 series The Casebook Of Max And Ivan, in which they played private detectives, featured a 2015 episode in which they investigated a series of sporting injuries at a sink school, with a guest cast that included Jessica Hynes, Tom Parry and Lewis Macleod.
And, as a journalist and gym enthusiast, Olesker has written articles about the phenomenon of spornosexuality, an evolution in metrosexuality in which men strive to look like sport or porn stars.