When it was first announced that Saturday Night Live would transfer to the UK, I called the show “doomed”. I was writing on a heady wave of confidence. British audiences are derisive about importing American formats, the show’s cast of young comics seemed absent the necessary star power, and the series was due to air on Sky One, a channel that no one (except, perhaps, Richard Branson and the Duke of Westminster) can afford. It looked doomed. And yet the show is back now for a second series, which kicked off last night with renewed vigour. So, is SNL UK turning into a bit of a sleeper hit?
“I’m the new PM,” Andy Burnham (George Fouracres) announces during the season opening sketch, “and I’m nothing like the last one!” The line is delivered with a wink. Back in March, Fouracres raised the curtain on the first series playing Keir Starmer. Times have changed, but the sources of comedic inspiration are reliable. The Royal Family make an appearance (“don’t tell me you’ve spent all your Netflix money!” Charles (Larry Dean) laments to a returning Harry and Meghan), as does Celeste Dring’s Claudia Winkleman impression (the return of The Traitors in a couple of weeks will likely prove irresistible to the writers’ room). The only new cast member – Freddie Meredith – debuts in a passable scene in which he plays a young man being fed pick-up lines by Jeff Goldbum, who hosts this episode.
Without wishing to demean the enormous charisma of Mr Goldblum, one does sometimes have the sense that he will do anything for attention. After Tina Fey opened the first series, there seemed to be a dearth of A-listers willing to cross the pond for this SNL franchise. And so, Goldblum (who was also the top line guest on the first episode of Claudia Winkleman’s ill-fated chat show) is, at least, a genuine international star. “Well I’m hoping to be,” he warbles at a piano during a sing-song opening monologue, “your precise cup of tea!” The problem with Goldblum as a host is that he is both incredibly game yet also has the dramatic range of a hyperactive toddler. He plays, well, Jeff Goldblum in each of his sketches, the highlight of which is a musing on imaginary friends with a genuinely heart-breaking punchline.
SNL sketches are always spotty, and this season opener is more miss than hit. There’s a good gag at the heart of Gregor J Dupont (Fouracres, again), a thespian who dresses up as a baby to prepare expectant parents, yet the delivery rips off Brian Butterfield, Peter Serafinowicz’s business guru, and the tone feels cadged from Ollie and Archimedes, a pair of verbose British tots who appeared on Very Important People. Ania Magliano and Paddy Young (who should be incorporated into more of the main sketches, in my opinion) return to Weekend Update, and the material continues to be enjoyably edgy. Magliano muses that Germany’s Alternative für Deutschland is really more of an “old classic for Germany”, while Young observes that Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu might’ve thought that “Burnham was just something you do to refugee camps”. While the gags in this section are largely quite sharp, the delivery is a tad stumbling.
Because the cast are good and growing in confidence (some, like Ayoade Bamgboye and Hammed Animashaun get almost no screentime in this episode, though that will likely be evened out over the series), the show has legs. Yet it remains unpolished and, squirreled away on Sky One, is unlikely to find the sort of audience necessary to make it a major talent factory for UK comedy. Ultimately, the show will live or die on its virality, its clippability (to coin a horrible word), yet the YouTube channel currently has just 196k subscribers (for reference, ThomasWoodenRailway, a channel dedicated to a man’s Thomas the Tank Engine model rail set, has 215k subscribers). Since it first aired, the British comedy scene has been talking a lot about SNL UK, yet it doesn’t seem to have the breakout potential of Taskmaster, Have I Got News for You, or even a podcast like Off Menu.
And so, yes, it still feels a bit doomed. There are exogenous pressures beyond the control of Daran Johnson and his team of writers, or the cast. The fact that the next two episodes will be hosted by Jamie Demetriou and Amelia Dimoldenberg (both funny, yet hardly household names) suggests that the producers are struggling to pitch the project to Hollywood stars on the publicity trail. It makes the show feel parochial when it should be a showcase for the deep reserves of untapped talent still bubbling away under British soil.