SNL UK host Tina Fey
Look, I bloody loved it. Am I deeply, stratospherically biased? Given that my background is not just in comedy, but in that most ignoble, benighted, and frequently dismissed of artforms, sketch comedy (as part of double-act Max & Ivan I’ve created numerous live shows, as well as series for ITV2 and the mighty BBC Radio 4) the answer, without a shadow of a doubt, is yes!
I was so ready to leap to the defence of Saturday Night Live UK, so chomping at the bit to fire back at the inevitable tsunami of doubters, naysayers and curmudgeons, that the moment the first episode had ended on Saturday night I fired off a first draft of this article which was a wildly defensive extended meditation on the sentiment “actually you’re all wrong, it is good!!!!’
Only, to my utter delight, I didn’t really need to. Sure, there was the odd snippy review, but, by and large, reactions have been … positive. Hook it to my veins.
SNL is, of course, an American import – the creation and life’s work of feared and revered Canadian uber-producer Lorne Michaels – and it’s been running in the States for 50 years. There have been other live topical shows in the UK – Friday Night Live, The 11 O’ Clock Show – and we have our own specific and rich traditions of satire, from Spitting Image to Have I Got News For You to Mock the Week. But SNL has always stood alone in its ambition, its scale – celebrity hosts, big musical acts, a huge team of writers and performers turning around new sketches, week in week out, with full sets and wigs and costumes. It’s less a TV show and more a cottage industry (in fact, given the number of people employed, more like a New York brownstone industry).
George Fouracres as Keir Starmer and Hammed Animashaun as David Lammy. Photo: Sky UK
There have always been whispers of the UK attempting something similar – but they have always been dismissed. We’d never get the budgets. We don’t do writers’ rooms in the UK (preferring to rely on extracting every last drop of creativity from a single auteur until they inevitably have a colossal nervous breakdown). The scale just isn’t feasible. So what changed? Mainly: Lorne Michaels. A figure of rare power in the industry, Michaels throwing his full weight behind a UK production – not just licensing out the name and cashing a cheque (sorry, “check”) – meant that creative and production forces have massed to this show in a manner not seen in UK comedy for many years.
How did the show nail it? Let me count the ways.
As the very first host, Tina Fey was an immaculate booking. The comic and writer is a living embodiment of the best of SNL, and a performer of almost supernatural likability. Her monologue was full of sharp lines, adeptly introducing the show (“Why do a UK version of SNL? Like so many large-scale US operations – no-one really knows why!”) and the new cast (“One boy is either Scottish or choking”), as well as gamely chatting to some celebrities in the audience – a moment which they wisely and pithily used to address the cynics and doom-mongers head-on. “British people tend to root for the failures of others,” as Nicola Coughlan pointed out.
It shouldn’t have taken an American TV grandee to scare the UK industry into spending money
And, during the sketches – in which Fey gamely played characters including a smug movie star, Shakespeare’s wife and a miserable divorcee – she demonstrated that she could muck in with the new cast without feeling the need to overshadow their performances.
Speaking of which, there really were some gorgeous turns. Hammed Animashaun (from BBC One’s Black Ops, and a regular at the National Theatre) shone as a blunt movie reviewer, cutting through the guff of a junket and giving his unvarnished feelings; superlative online sketch comic Al Nash played a deranged Captain Birdseye; Emma Sidi had a surreal 11th-hour turn as a larger-than-life cockney bra-fitter.
Tina Fey and Emma Sidi in SNL UK. Photo: Sky
The much anticipated Weekend Update – the show’s trademark spoof newscast, which generally contains the highest concentration of up-to-the-minute punchlines – was the perfect showcase for Ania Magliano’s twinkling charm and Paddy Young’s smouldering darkness, as they tackled headlines including an ex-prince in Sandringham and ex-pats in Dubai: “They went there to evade income tax and now they have to evade incoming attacks.”
Of all the cast, George Fouracres (a Globe theatre regular, and a member of sketch trio Daphne with Phil Wang and Jason Forbes) had the choice of plum roles, and he hurled himself at them – not least his 45 Seconds With Fouracres segment which, in all in its accent-blending lunacy, recalled the madness of early Vic & Bob and George Dawes.
The show had a sharper, flintier British sensibility (exhibit A: the advert for Underáge, by Pedolay – a skin cream so effective, “everyone will think your husband is a nonce”). Beeping Lime bikes, Cilla Black, the phrase “c*nty little earring”; already it feels like a British show with its own identity, not a mere clone.
Pre-show scepticism surrounding SNL UK appears to have been mainly replaced with a sense of giddy excitement. Which is great, given that they’re just getting started. I can’t wait to see more from Celeste Dring, Larry Dean, Annabel Marlow and Ayoade Bamgboye as weeks go by – they all deserved more time to shine.
The only real shame is the fact that it took a cultural import to inspire this kind of investment in homegrown sketch comedy.
Because it is a huge investment – there’s the promotion (billboards; advertising; massive PR campaign; some sort of indeterminate promotional tie-up with Greggs). And there’s the production itself: 20-strong writing team; 11 performers and the time and resources it takes to audition and chemistry-test and cast them; a phalanx of production crew; and a booker with the heft and charm (and kompromat) required to secure the celebrity hosts. All of that talent was already here, in this country, prior to last week (possibly with the exception of Wally Feresten, the fabled American cue-card handler – fair enough, that’s a skill worth sharing). It shouldn’t have taken an American TV grandee to scare the UK industry into spending the money needed to hire them and shine a spotlight on their work.
What SNL UK proved – and, in fact, I’d argue this is something everyone could agree with, even the hecklers – is that UK comedy needs more investment, and the space and support to take more risks. UK TV commissioners – to paraphrase Nicola Coughlan and Michael Cera berating Tina Fey at the start of the show – educate yourselves!
Max Olesker is a writer and comedian. His debut memoir, Making The Cut: An Unorthodox Love Story, published by Ebury Press, is out now.