‘How could this be anything other than funny?!’ Behind the scenes of Saturday Night Live UK
SNL is a US comedy institution – can a British version rise to the challenge of finding the funny in our comparatively beige politicians every week? We speak to the team hand-picked to do just that
It is the calm before the storm. The storm being the impending debut of Saturday Night Live UK, our very own version of the US’s headline-grabbing, agenda-setting, impossibly influential TV comedy institution. The calm is a group of performers and writers sitting round a table in a bare-walled boardroom in west London’s Television Centre, seemingly unperturbed by the gargantuan task of staging a live sketch show – most of which will be written in the week of broadcast – or the prospect of a scathing reaction to it. Can SNL UK breathe new life into our ailing comedy industry? Or will the format fail spectacularly on these shores? I come away convinced I’m more nervous about finding out than the cast and crew are about actually making it.
Perhaps they’re just having too much fun. For the past four weeks, 11 performers and 20 writers have been spending every weekday together in this very building, hashing out premises for skits, workshopping each other’s material and “finding the alchemy”, as cast member and standup Ayoade Bamgboye puts it. For another, actor and TikToker Jack Shep, it’s been like “comedy boarding school”.
Fellow cast member Ania Magliano arrived with some scepticism, but discovered it was “difficult to keep worrying when you’re with people who make you laugh a lot. At the first table read I was like: how could this be anything other than funny?!” Head writer Daran “Jonno” Johnson thinks he’d be anxious if he was “any less giddy”. “I don’t think we’re hubristic, though,” says character comedian Emma Sidi. It’s just that the lovely time they’re all having “unfortunately does make us [feel] positive”.
The excitement is palpable – and understandable: SNL UK is an incredible gig for two reasons. The first is simply being associated with a show that has owned the comic zeitgeist for more than half a century. Created in 1975 by producer Lorne Michaels, Saturday Night Live made instant icons of its original cast – John Belushi, Chevy Chase, Dan Aykroyd, Gilda Radner – and went on to churn out dozens more, from Bill Murray to Eddie Murphy, Adam Sandler, Will Ferrell and Tina Fey (who is reportedly hosting the first episode of the UK incarnation).
Earlier this year, the cast visited the Manhattan studio where SNL has always been filmed. For Sidi, it felt like a “pilgrimage … Mike Myers walked past me backstage and I just shuddered with gratitude for Austin Powers. There was such an awareness of the history informing why I do this job.”
You could also attribute their high spirits to the simple fact of employment. “Since lockdown it feels like British comedy television has been slowly atrophying,” says writer Gráinne Maguire. “A huge opportunity like this is so exciting.” The SNL model seems unthinkably luxurious on this side of the pond, where sitcoms are often written by just one person, regular writers’ room jobs are pretty much nonexistent, and getting paid to collaborate and experiment for two months before going into production is unheard of.
Presumably, Sky is only willing to take on such expense due to the inherent newsworthiness of the project; money couldn’t buy the publicity this spin-off has already generated. Michaels’s involvement (it was his idea) also makes SNL UK seem like a safer bet. The week I visit, he and alumnus Seth Meyers have been in London, sitting in on table reads and, in Meyers’s case, accompanying head producer James Longman to a West Ham match. Have they offered any feedback on the sketches they’ve heard? “I think it’s too soon for that,” says cast member Celeste Dring. To make it into the show itself, skits will have to impress producers and a test audience, but for now everyone is brainstorming in a fully supportive environment. “At the moment, we can’t really get it wrong,” Dring admits.
SNL tends to combine contemporary pop culture parody with riffs on the week’s news. This means it’s possible that nothing anyone has written so far will make it into the show. Might they use any of the material that won the writers their jobs in the first place? Um, no, says Johnson, who is best known as one-third of sketch trio Sheeps. “Because of the week when people submitted their sketches [in April 2025], half were about the death of Pope Francis. If we do end up using one in episode one, it’s because we’re in trouble.”
“Two of them, and we’re in massive trouble,” chimes in fellow writer – and Sheeps member – Al Roberts.
Yet preparation of a more practical sort is well under way. On SNL, scripts are reworked so close to the wire that the cast often read their lines while performing, so yesterday the UK cast had a workshop with SNL’s longtime cue card maestro, Wally Feresten (“I need an eye test is what we learned,” says Dring). When I ask comedian and cast member Al Nash how he’s getting in the zone, he thuds a copy of Live from New York, Tom Shales and James Andrew Miller’s 800-page oral history of SNL, down on the table. “Some of us like to do our research.” What insight has he gained? “I actually haven’t started reading it yet.” That doesn’t really matter because he’s already seen how the show works with his own eyes. The filming process is “quick and mad, but I left being like: this feels doable”. Michaels told him SNL was “like sports” in that nobody can afford to dwell on a disappointing episode. “It’s a new week, just go again.”
For Longman – whose credits include The Friday Night Project, Never Mind the Buzzcocks and James Corden’s US chatshow – the advice has been even more straightforward. “Lorne keeps saying to me things like: just get it on air.” The producer was tapped for the job in 2023 after being summoned to a meeting with Michaels at the Beverly Hills Hotel. He has spent the intervening years wrangling the finer details, a seemingly endless job: when we meet in February, numerous elements are still TBC, including the running time and broadcast slot. The US version airs at an inordinately late 11.30pm – a few weeks after I visit the set, it’s announced that SNL UK will launch at a more sensible 10pm.
His most pressing task, however, was sourcing future superstars. The cast were mainly drawn from hundreds of self-taped auditions, although there was also “a tiny bit of courtship”. One such recruit was Sidi. She was on maternity leave with her and Roberts’s first child when she heard about SNL UK, and dismissed the possibility of auditioning (“I was like: I’m busy”). But her agent was insistent, so she agreed to skip straight to the second stage – the live showcase – “physically running there and back” in the brief gap between breastfeeds. Now her 11-month-old son has his own room at the studios, complete with SNL-branded teddy. Are she and Roberts apprehensive about juggling it all? “No … mmm, I guess I am worried, but it doesn’t matter. I had to go back to work eventually.”
Others were slightly keener to be cast. “Golly gosh” was Annabel Marlow’s reaction to the announcement. “I thought: oh gosh, I want to be in it.” When Paddy Young saw the news, “Straight away I was like: I have to do this. There’s less being made than ever and it just feels like you’re not quite right [for most TV projects].” Standup Larry Dean was similarly enthusiastic, although the final screen test was a challenge. “I think it’s a form of torture in some countries,” he deadpans. “There’s nothing that makes you question your sanity like trying to be funny in a massive empty room to a camera.”
How did Longman choose? “We were looking for the funniest people; we didn’t go in for name recognition.” Although the cast are far from “the usual suspects” people might expect, the usual avenues to UK comedy success are well represented: among the cast are three Cambridge Footlights alumni – more in the writers’ room – and five Edinburgh fringe award nominees, plus Bamgboye, who won the newcomer prize last year.
The cast range from 26 to 36: was there an age limit? “Not really,” says Longman, although he did want “a new generation on the screen”. The unpredictability of the format means teamwork is vital, and he’s been impressed by the camaraderie because “comedians can be unsupportive”. Actor Hammed Animashaun describes his castmates as “really nice. I think I might be the … C U next Tuesday.” Dring laughs: “I thought you were gonna say, ‘I might be the nicest’ – I was like, you’re up there!”
They may be a breath of fresh air to the average viewer, but the cast say they’re experienced enough to weather the inevitable criticism. Although SNL remains popular – its weekly audience is about 8 million – it has long attracted vociferous backlash, with some branding it Saturday Night Dead. Shep isn’t worried: “I was a gay teenager posting skits online. I’ve had hate before.”
As a high-profile TV show, however, SNL UK is likely to invite far more feedback than anyone here has ever faced. There’s “an excessive binary about being angered or impressed by comedy. And that’s a risky business,” notes Sidi. “You can watch drama and think that wasn’t really for me, whereas people have a visceral reaction to people trying to be funny,” says Young. “I dread to imagine how many of my audience members have thought: how dare he think he’s funny! I mean, people have said it.”It’s an occupational hazard – and a national concern: we tend to take comedy to heart in this country. “Humour is such a part of British identity,” says Magliano, and because SNL UK is being explicitly branded as British “there might be a sense of: does this align with what us watching think of our British sense of humour?”
What about this Britishness, then? It’s something Sky’s head of entertainment, Phil Edgar-Jones, has said SNL UK “has to” have. But when I ask the writers to define it, they respond with caution. “There’s something I wouldn’t back myself to articulate that does feel distinct in the tone,” says Johnson. “It’s quite different to the American style,” says fellow writer Omodara Olatunji. How? “I don’t know if I want to answer that.” Another, Nathan Foad, also demurs. “I’m not going to confidently answer that. But how could it possibly not feel British in its identity?”
The cast are more forthcoming. Dean thinks British humour “is much more self-deprecating – we don’t think we’re the greatest country in the world like America. And our silliness is different.” Dring believes we’re more “open to the absurd and maybe the trivial. We’ll flirt with the darkness a bit more.”
From the outside, there are things about the SNL format that do read as intensely American: the brashness of the humour and a certain showbizzy self-satisfaction could seem cringeworthy here. “Someone once said Americans are born whooping,” says Longman, who knows our audiences will be more reserved. Doesn’t our comedy tend to be more subtle and understated, too? “Not in my performances,” says cast member George Fouracres. “Screaming goblins. Genuinely a lot of my comedy is screaming demons and goblins.”
Yet, there is clearly “something about the live sketch that isn’t nuanced”, says Dring, who describes the form as “old school”. Indeed, with its musical performances and celebrity guest hosts, SNL often resembles a traditional variety show. What gives it an edge is that those hosts tend to be the most famous people on the planet. Getting the gig is a status symbol, meaning everyone from Timothée Chalamet to Ariana Grande is willing to spend nearly a full week planning and rehearsing. Inspiring the same level of dedication from the super-famous will be a challenge for SNL UK, but also vital for its viewing figures.
Another element being carried over from the US is Weekend Update, the spoof news segment that kickstarted the careers of Amy Poehler, Jimmy Fallon, Norm Macdonald and Meyers himself. In the hands of anchors Young and Magliano, it will be “a real break from the topical British comedy that we’re used to”, says Maguire. In what sense? “Because it’s a new generation.” How are they different? “They don’t own their own homes,” quips fellow writer (and Wrexham football club director) Humphrey Ker.
SNL is also notorious for impersonations – Ferrell’s George Bush, Fey’s Sarah Palin, Alec Baldwin’s Trump – that change the way the country views its (prospective) leaders. Yet British politics doesn’t seem to have much scope for wacky pastiche at present. How do you riotously send up Keir Starmer?
“There’s a lot of conversations about the angle on people who are really boring and no one knows about,” admits Magliano. Sidi finds the blandness “funnier”, pointing out that she did a one-woman show in the guise of the essentially anonymous Partygate investigator Sue Gray. She’s “not actually envious” of the material Trump provides. “There’s a greyness mixed with some big problems with our system that’s quite ripe for satire.”
Bamgboye concurs. “I’m so enamoured by the banal and that’s my favourite part of Britishness. I’m obsessed with small talk and how flat a lot of our day to day is.” She is looking to legend of news satire Chris Morris for inspiration. “He’s like, when the jokes write themselves, they’re not jokes. You go straight to the heart of it and you find that thing.”
It won’t be easy. For a start, nobody is sure whether Starmer will even be prime minister by the time they launch in mid-March. And that’s just one of a thousand unknowns: we’ve had sketch shows and variety shows and topical satire shows, but SNL UK – a combination of all three, on the hoof – remains uncharted territory. The cast and writers seem optimistic, but has Longman, the man with ultimate responsibility, been reassured by their work so far? “It’s absolutely put my mind at rest,” he nods, before immediately backtracking. “Not absolutely … It’s put my mind to doze.”
Portraits Manuel Vazquez /The Guardian
Set designer Lee Flude
Styling Raphael Castelmezzano/Kevin Fortune
Hair and makeup designer Diana Estrada Hudson
Makeup supervisor Charlie Wilkinson
Hair stylists Kerstin Weller/Becca Lymbourides
Makeup artist Charlotte Kemp
Saturday Night Live UK starts on Sky One and Now on 21 March.