This Sunday, a number of the UK’s very best comedians – including Alex Horne, Rosie Jones, Phil Wang and Ed Gamble – will converge in a wrestling ring and do battle, whilst some more of the UK’s very best comedians – including Joe Lycett, Aisling Bea, Nish Kumar, and Suzi Ruffell – will act as managers, commentators, and ring announcers, in front of a 1000+ crowd.
How this event came about, and how it finally came to London, is a tale twelve years in the making. It’s the result of a number of things: this very magazine, the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, and – bizarrely – luxury fitness chain ‘Third Space’.
I’d like to take you back to a simpler time. The year? 2011. The place? London’s bustling Carnaby Street. I was an aspiring writer – fresh-faced, dewey-eyed, curly-haired, and handlebar-moustached (it was a “Movember” thing – as I say, this was a simpler time) – and, to my delight and amazement, had recently secured employment as a junior staff member at Esquire magazine.
However, when not writing as many articles as I could, attempting to coax food and drink PRs into sponsoring the magazine’s many important lunches (successfully) or booking my Editor’s many Fashion Week flights (far less successfully), I had a dark secret – I was pursuing comedy.
It wasn’t a secret that I was a comedian – in my job interview I’d been very open about the fact that I was performing gigs with my double-act partner Ivan most nights of the week, and my Editor, perhaps as an amusing social experiment to see how little sleep a human truly can survive on, hired me anyway.
But, since I’d taken up my position at Esquire, something had happened: as the result of a chance boozy chat with the comedy programmer of the Pleasance Theatre, Ivan and I had been allowed to make a long-held dream of ours a reality – a show in which comedians are transformed into wrestlers. We had been given the Pleasance’s biggest venue in the Edinburgh Fringe, and one night in August which to attempt to make it happen.
The run-up to the show immediately took on a life of its own, and my working life – already stretched hilariously thin – acquired an additional dimension. In amongst my – let’s be clear – full time job, there was a whirlwind of planning; coaxing comedians into agreeing to wrestle, sourcing costumes, designing entrances, and of course, training people to wrestle. (By the way, the inspiration for the show came from my past as a teenage wrestler – something I wrote about in my inaugural Esquire feature – so this melding of comedy and wrestling wasn’t as rogue as it might seem. It was more like the inevitable combination of my two, incredibly specific, sets of skills)
“Hello old stick, I’ve only got an hour, and it’ll have to be in Soho.” Such was the message I received from my old friend, the incredibly-tall-and-posh comedian Humphrey Ker (now an American comedy star and executive director of Wrexham FC – in a perhaps-inevitable melding of his particular set of skills). He’d kindly agreed to appear on the show in one of the key matches, but we’d reached a seemingly-insurmountable snag: if I couldn’t magic up a place for us to train, in accordance with Humph’s extremely specific window of availability, there was no way he could wrestle safely, and the entire show would fall apart. It all hinged on this. I had to find somewhere (and I had to take that hour with Humph as my lunchbreak, for good measure). It all seemed completely impossible. And then Third Space rose to the occasion.
Having been informed of my plight by a colleague on a sister magazine, the gym had very kindly flung open their doors to me for one glorious hour. I’d never been in such a rarefied fitness haven before in my life. The lighting was soft, the interiors were lush – but all was irrelevant. We jogged through the gym until we arrived at the promised land; the matted area. There, in 58 minutes, we thrashed out the moves and techniques Humph needed to wrestle in his match. The show was saved.
That Edinburgh show kicked off a colourful comedic journey. The Wrestling was a surprise hit (no one being more surprised than me), and opened a host of doors. I, before long, inevitably moved to a freelance position within the Esquire firmament, allowing the juggling of writing, and comedy, and life, and occasionally sleep, with marginally more success (it’s very much a work in progress, as my most recent feature attests to). And, over the years, The Wrestling grew. James Acaster got KO’d with a metal tray. Rhys Nicholson entered the ring in a zipline. Ronny Chieng made the most unnecessarily-elaborate entrance of all time, taking a limo from one side of the road to another, and then riding a Segway five metres up a ramp. The show went to the Melbourne International Comedy Festival. It landed in an even larger room in Edinburgh. It partnered with Comic Relief. And now, on Sunday March 5th, in the largest room we’ve ever played, it’s coming to London.
I’m older and wiser now. The show has evolved, I’m no longer curly haired, and none of my charitable endeavours involve me growing a handlebar moustache. But in many ways, this moment feels like the very lead-up to the first time we ran the show in Edinburgh, all those years ago. It’s a brand new challenge – a new venue, a new city, a leap into the unknown. And, whilst I now train the comedians in a brilliant wrestling school, PlayFight, Third Space have risen to the occasion once more, too. They’ve evolved as well, having recently opened a branch in Moorgate – so space-age and clean and relaxed and well-appointed that, without putting too fine a point on it, I would rather live in any random corner of the building than in my own flat. It is here that I train every day in preparation for the show, and here that, once a week, a Third Space Elite trainer named Jordan Lue calmly and efficiently directs me to move heavy objects, in sessions which invariably begin with me feeling swaggeringly over-confident and end with me strongly wishing I had never been born. 10/10, would recommend.
This Sunday, life will come full circle, and the show that I snuck out of the office to plan will touch down in London, with a number of my (very understanding) Esquire colleagues in the audience. The champion, Rosie Jones, will defend her title in an eight-way elimination match. Ivan and I will take on Ed ‘The Gambler’ Gamble and his tag team partner, fearsome pro-wrestler Levi Muir, in a grudge match which kicked off when they bodyslammed us both on the roof of the O2 Arena. It’s the biggest, most exciting, most terrifying show of our careers. Who will be victorious?
There’s only one way to find out.
Max & Ivan’s The Wrestling in aid of Comic Relief takes place on Sunday March 5th, at Indigo at the O2, as part of the Just For Laughs London festival. Doors at 7.30pm for an 8.00pm start. Tickets available HERE.
