Wait, SNL UK was… good?

Lorne Michaels’ Saturday Night Takeaway is well worth a sample

When they announced a British edition of Saturday Night Live back in 2025, it seemed doomed to fail.

Comedy travels about as well as clotted cream on a hot train; it ages even faster. TV history is littered with the mangled corpses of previous attempts to adapt UK/US comedies committed against all good sense. Head down to the comedy morgue, open up the chilled storage and pull out exhibit one: the warped body of something in a body bag which, if you squint, might resemble legendary British sitcom The Inbetweeners, transplanted from the detached mock Tudors and anonymous comprehensives of the suburban Home Counties and dropped heavily into the back yard of the global hegemon. Not good, because everyone knows that this was a show that only worked if set in Uxbridge or Ruislip. Back into the corpse-fridge it slides: SHHHHMT. In the deep freeze next door is a specimen that has never been identified. Perhaps it is one of the many abortive attempts at making Peep Show in the USA? This one could even be female; nobody can tell, so many times have attempts at resuscitation been made. Time to finally let it rest.

There are others in the morgue, too, mostly long-forgotten remake pilots: The Vicar of Dibley (alias The Minister of Divine), The IT Crowd, two abortive attempts at AbFab. Other shows have stumbled out, still half-living or permanently mutilated. Veep almost managed to capture the crass, omnishambolic genius of The Thick of It, sure – but only after an adaptation of the actual show failed. ABC rejected a pilot based closely on the original, and creator Armando Iannucci was openly relieved. “It was terrible,” he said around 2007. “They took the idea and chucked out all the style. It was all conventionally shot and there was no improvisation or swearing. It didn’t get picked up, thank God.”

Some adaptations work, of course – the most famous being The Office and Shameless. Episodes even managed to spin the whole dynamic into its own sitcom, in a sort of meta-commentary on differing Anglo-American comic tastes. But all in all, it makes sense to be bearish on transatlantic comedy remakes, given the successes seem to be the exceptions, rather than the rule itself. So, I naturally thought SNL UK would crash and burn.

And then, shortly before the air date, I saw the cast, and realised that, hey – perhaps there was something here after all. It was full of talent who, importantly, had put in the hours; people with at least half a dozen Fringes under their belts, or who had made it through the Footlights-to-Avalon pipeline. I’d seen Ania Magliano do stand up. I knew George Foreacres from his monthly Budpod appearances. Celeste Dring, of Lazy Susan, had been good in The Windsors. A friend of mine who works in UK comedy described an open audition process where almost every comedian in the country under 40 applied, which resulted in two things: an initial cast of 20- and 30-somethings who had, in many cases, been circling mainstream success but never quite broken through, and a load of very embittered applicants who didn’t make the cut.¹

And then I watched it, and it was funny! The sketches were clever, the impressions excellent (I must here begrudgingly tip my hat to Peter Serafinowicz, who I have criticised on this blog before, and his version of Nigel Farage). And Sky, which airs the show, clearly let the writers embrace subject matter that somewhere like the BBC wouldn’t dare. Was SNL UK suddenly in danger of making actually-good TV comedy?

The difficulty for topical comedy shows is that from the 1970s through to the 2000s, everyone had very common cultural reference points. There were only three channels on TV, a few radio stations, and smaller publishing and music industries. Then, with the advent of the internet – and to an extent, a more diverse mass media in general – everything fragmented, and we no longer all laughed at the same stuff. Humour became more niche, in general, while also allowing a massive proliferation of comedians to carve out spaces within the flourishing alternative scene. For a top-line comedian to break through – a Peter Kay or a Michael McIntyre – they had to go broad and simple with their points of reference.

So the truly surprising thing about SNL UK is that the show has succeeded by leaning into obscurity, not out of it. Counterintuitively, its writers have packed the series full of deep cuts and Britcore in-jokes.

Here’s one: the “Mr Bagley” sketch, which is almost a shot-for-shot remake of a semi-famous video clip of ex-Arsenal and England striker Ian Wright meeting his old primary school teacher at Highbury for the first time in 23 years. It’s originally from a documentary called “With a Little Help from My Friends” which aired in 2005.

How to explain this clip to an outsider? “Someone said you was dead” has become a sort of running bit among millennial football fans, a good-natured joke at Ian Wright’s expense that nonetheless shows him in a good light, as that rare thing: a footballer from the 1990s who is in touch with his emotions. It’s a meme, basically. Chat to the right people in the right pub and they might have seen this clip, but it’s hardly a given. As “object on which to write a sketch for national TV”, it’s a real stretch.

Here’s what SNL did with it:

Most people in Britain wouldn’t get this reference. To hang a whole three-minute script on it is insane. But it somehow works.

Sometimes it’s just a single line, such as one halfway through a cold open where MI6, circa 1997, puts into motion a “29-year plan” to rehabilitate Prince Charles’ image by making Prince Andrew the fall guy for the whole royal family. “This all seems very high-risk,” says Jack Shep as Andrew. “God, I’m sweating.”²

Or else it’s Mr Blobby as infernal Thatcherite egregore, awakened by miners in the East Midlands with devastating results. This one has awfully believable British talking heads – the ex-colliery man, the retired police “Gold Commander” – and supposedly found footage action clips replete with period-accurate uniforms and weaponry you’d recognise from the Falklands or late-1980s Belfast.

There are loads of these moments: “Nick Knowles eating chicken out of his jacket pocket” is not a joke that would travel well. “What kind of Irish is your grandad?” might… possibly? Martin Lewis made a cameo appearance in an episode, for Christ’s sake, while Al Nash did a world-conquering Harry Kane. The clip from the series that I’ve heard most people talk about is based on the fairly niche observation of racial bias in The Traitors.

On paper, these bits go against all received wisdom of what contemporary TV comedy should be: they seem far too specific in their respective conceits. But – and I appreciate that this is very subjective – somehow they still work within themselves. The least strong sketches, on the other hand, were the ones where the subject matter roamed too far from home and became a little so-so and generic – like one where Melania Trump appears out of a hedge at a suburban British BBQ to complain about the Epstein files.

The hosts helped, of course. They roped in Tina Fey and Jimmy Fallon for the earlier episodes, but they never really needed them. Jack Whitehall did his usual Jack Whitehall stuff. Nicola Coughlan is well on her way to national treasure status (and she’s from Galway; educate yourself). When the writers cast sometime rapper Riz Ahmed as a doctor trying to deliver a PSA about prostate cancer on pirate radio, you can see the payoff coming an imperial mile away – but the result is still really fun. I particularly enjoyed “Hostage”, and how it casts Jamie Dornan – he of The Fall, a show so darkly threatening that I know several women who refuse to watch it alone – against type while writing in every zillennial relationship vagary you can think of (one YouTube wag suggested it should be called “Hostage Situationship”, which, yeah, very good).

Earlier this month, it was confirmed that SNL UK has been renewed for another 12 episodes, due to air in September. Last year, the original US edition passed 1,000 episodes, having been on air for 51 years. Whether we’ll still be live from London in 2077 remains to be seen, as does the question of whether the renewal will lead them to broaden the writing and dilute some of the weirdness – but if SNL UK continues to deliver offbeat bits like it has so far, I’ll be delighted to have been proven so wrong about its prospects.

BONUS ROUND: A handful of standout sketches that I wanted to feature but couldn’t fit into the above:

- DadSwap, particularly George Foreacres earnestly saying “Dads are scientifically proven to be among the hardest parents to connect with.”

- Undérage, and the immortal line “My skin looks so fresh, my husband can’t go anywhere without being hunted by right-wing, paedophile-catching militias.”

- The madcap Gen Z weekend update feature where Annabel Marlow and Jack Shep gurn and dance and generally channel theatre-kid energy, which seems to have flummoxed even Zoomers on Youtube themselves (the typically earnest top comment: “Hey guys, I think the joke is that this is absurd and no one in gen z is like this, but people are so out of touch they won’t even realize one way or the other.”)

- The truly unnerving “QVC banter” sketch where Nicola Coughlan a) does a masterfully good English accent and b) very nearly corpses when Emma Sidi hushes her by putting her weirdly long finger to her lips.

- The Mastermind “Things My Mum Has Told Me About People I’ve Never Met And Have No Connection To”.

Enjoy.

1. Being jealous of other, more successful comedians is the only thing most comedians do better than actually being funny.

2. American readers – a genuine question: how widely did this story penetrate the US media ecosystem at the time? Did people talk about the Maitlis Newsnight interview at all?