When Saturday Night Live first aired on network television in 1975, it was chaos. A 30-year-old Lorne Michaels stormed onto American airwaves with his ragtag cast – known as the Not Ready for Prime Time Players – including future stars like Chevy Chase, Dan Ackroyd and Gilda Radner. It was spontaneous television that became an anarchic hit and is, more than 50 years later, being refashioned for British audiences in the form of Saturday Night Live UK. With a new suite of accents and a novel set of pop culture references, will it recapture that early magic or prove an underwhelming replica?
For the launch, American comedian Tiny Fey has been roped in to host the Sky One debut. “I’m just here as a longtime SNL employee to help out,” she jokes in her opening monologue. Why no British host? “None of you f***ers would do it,” Fey explains, deploying the first of many obscenities (the primary ideological diversion from its American kin). Still, Fey is game to indulge singularly British jokes, including references to Come Dine with Me and Noughties adverts for Autoglass. Joining a young, talented cast of comics – Taskmaster’s Emma Sidi is probably the best known – Fey proves a capable, experienced doula for this arrival. How the next two hosts – Jamie Dornan and Riz Ahmed – fare may be a better indicator of the show’s ultimate longevity.
To some extent, Saturday Night Live UK is already doomed as a TV show. It’s airing on Sky One, which vanishingly few Brits have access to. And the series has only been commissioned for a measly eight episodes, whereas a season of the US version traditionally lasts for 20. The decision, too, to programme Premier League football before this curtain raiser means there’s scarcely time to advertise FoxyBingo before the opening sketch rolls. Still, none of that really matters, because the creators know that SNL UK doesn’t really need to function as a linear TV show (at least not in the way its forebear did in 1975). For it to gain traction, it has to work as a collection of clips. Clips that can be liked and commented on and shared from one numb scroller to another.
This offers some freedom to the famously hit-and-miss format of SNL. Here, there are several misses – an interminable David Attenborough sketch which, barring Jack Shep’s bang-on Princess Diana impression, fails to arrive at a punchline; or an inelegant swipe at the low-hanging fruit that is the Keir Starmer premiership – but also a handful of hits. A de-aging serum so effective it will lead to your husband being targeted by paedophile hunters; a Paddington immersive experience featuring a grizzly bear, onto whose pate Tina Fey has glue-gunned a red bucket hat; a zingy Weekend Review segment, in which Ania Magliano and Paddy Young deliver topical jokes with far more edge than the limp US version (“Coming up, paedophiles – but first, war!”). If some gags – such as one about Prince Andrew’s body being found in a marsh (?) – fall flat, at least they’re willing to hazard their audience taking offence.
Some of these skits will translate to social media and begin to build the SNL brand in the UK. While SNL represents the quintessence of the American comedic establishment, it is not a title that has much Clapham omnibus cut-through here in Britain. It’s a bit of a shame, then, that the show plays it so safe with the formula, importing a commodity that has evolved from an anti-establishment brawl to a slick launchpad for franchise comedians. Michaels (producing from afar), director Liz Clare and head writer Jonno Johnson have done a good job putting together an intriguing panoply of talents, and they deserve credit for resisting the lure of bigger names who might’ve been tempted by a short run. But they don’t invest in much of a shake-up to the formula – host’s monologue, timely skits, fake adverts, musical guests, and all that jazz – which means SNL UK lacks its own spark of irreverence. At best it shows what it’s learnt from a half-century of its New York cousin; at worst it seems like tepid cosplay.
But judging a show like SNL off its opening episode is foolish. The chemistry between the cast needs time to settle, and the reaction on TikTok and Instagram will likely inform which sketches have legs (the Head Wound Harrys and David S Pumpkins, so to speak), and which end up in the writers’ room bin. What SNL UK’s opening episode does demonstrate is a willingness to push the envelope, to risk bad taste. Borrowing a beloved American format might feel a bit stale, but there are notes of new ingredients that could offer something fresh.
