What’s it called?

Max & Ivan: Fugitives

What’s it about?

Starting with the words “If you’re hearing this, we may already be dead” the podcast styles itself as a “geopolitical comedy thriller” and follows the titular Max and Ivan as they mistakenly download four gigabytes of classified Russian material, witness a murder, escape an assassination attempt and quickly wake up to the fact that they’re knee deep in a Massive Conspiracy when they end up locked in a shipping container saying thing like “If you’re hearing this, we may already be dead”. Much else happens in between, most of it silly enough for your correspondent to be able to say with absolute certainty: Spooks, this is not.

Who’s in it?

Max and Ivan are played by Max Olesker and Ivan Gonzalez (see what they’ve don there?) and the pair also wrote the eight-part podcast. Alongside them is an all-star cast which includes Gemma Whelan, Adam Buxton, Alice Lowe and Stephen Mangan.

What’s so good about it?

Besides the fact that it’s always a pleasure to hear Britpack A-listers on a podcast, the show is slick and funny and pleasingly dumb.

Best bits?

Max and Ivan (the characters) start our as tech developers so there’s plenty of opportunity for Max and Ivan (the writers) to take lengthy sideswipes at everything from Amazon to the Burning Man Festival.

Where can I find it?

Produced by Storyglass, the scripted podcast ‘label’ launched by Fremantle, makers of The X Factor and The Young Pope, it’s available to download for free from platforms such as iTunes.

For fans of …

The Wrong Mans