In my dark, dark past, I was a sketch comedian. I remember all too well the feeling of standing backstage just before the lights went up, wondering whether the next hour would bring the electric thrill of a good show or the agony of bombing. I’ve been thinking about that feeling in the past few weeks, and how much more intense it would be for the cast of the new UK Saturday Night Live as they waited to deliver their first show. A couple of months ago, I went to television studios to meet the cast and some of the writers. There was this enormous sense of hope in the air, excitement that UK comedy was being given such a large cash injection and big new platform. Some of that hope naturally rubbed off on me. All of the above means that, perhaps more than most people, I really wanted it to be good.
The promo skit that Sky released ahead of the first episode inspired little confidence. Tiny Fey, one of SNL US’s most celebrated alumnae and the UK version’s first guest host, arrived at the studios to give the UK cast advice in the form of Mary Poppins. She threw one of the cast his lunch, a “eel pie with extra eel”. I did not crack a smile. Eel pie jokes might be funny to an American audience watching a bunch of Brits, but are they funny to us?
The first episode went out this past Saturday. Was it perfect? No, it was not. I watched the abominable cold open hiding inside the neck of my hoodie. Wet Leg’s musical performances were dreadful.
But some of it was pretty good. Jack Shep, who starred variously as a yassified Shakespeare, a foetus pretending to be shy and Princess Diana, is plainly destined to be the breakout star. I genuinely laughed at the advert for an anti-ageing cream called Undérage which works so well “everyone will think your husband is a nonce”. Where it really shone, to my mind, was in the parts that got weird. On US SNL, they usually put the more off-the-wall sketches right at the end of the show, where skits are easiest to cut if they run out of time or the test audiences don’t respond well. And that is where they put “45 seconds with Fouracres”, in which Fouracres delivered a song called “What kind of Irish is your grandad?”, which defies description and which I recommend you seek out.
What grates a little is the inherently American flavour to the format. But the sort of high-energy, earnest goofiness that defines the US show is probably something we will just get used to. Still, I’m not sure why they felt the need to make the set look so very similar to the American one. Or to hew so close the precise beats of the US show: cold open followed by spoof advert followed by… etc, etc.
Perhaps it is simply that with this much money and effort being poured in, they don’t want to deviate very far from a format that has lasted 50 years over the pond. Besides, recent years have not been abundant ones for sketch comedy on UK television, nor for UK television in general. Budgets are slashed, producers are risk averse and fulltime employment is hard to come by. If it ain’t broke, for God’s sake, don’t try to fix it when there’s this much riding on it.
But I would argue that US SNL is, at least a little bit, broke. It is often not very funny. Having to roll out years’ worth of content about Donald Trump is, surely, quite a difficult task when everything the man does is itself so outlandishly beyond parody. But, even so, its glory days seem well and truly behind it.
My hope for this UK version is that it finds its own flavour and confidence to tinker the format to whatever works best with audiences here. The series was initially commissioned for six episodes and has now been extended to eight, a sign that Sky understand that the production deserves some time. We’re very good here in Britain at deciding that something new and ambitious is doomed to be awful before we’ve really given it a chance to get on its feet. I hope we can go against our instincts—and borrow just a little American-style optimism this time.
