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It's happening. After more than 50 years of entertaining audiences across the Atlantic, America’s legendary sketch comedy show Saturday Night Live is landing on British shores. It’s the TV show that first introduced the world to some of comedy’s biggest global stars, from Tina Fey and Kristen Wiig, to Will Ferrell and the late Bill Murray. Without SNL, we arguably wouldn’t have Mean Girls, Bridesmaids or even the Christmas classic Elf. But as the show finally crosses overseas, the jury's still out on whether Saturday Night Live UK will have the same impact.
Because while we have no shortage of late-night talk shows and panel formats (think: 8 Out of 10 Cats Does Countdown, Never Mind the Buzzcocks and the newly-minted The Claudia Winkleman Show), we’ve never quite nailed the live sketch-show formula over here. That’s not for lack of trying. Over the years, many have attempted – and failed – to replicate the success of SNL for British audiences, eventually being sent to the graveyard of forgotten shows. Add to that a general disconnect between the American and British humour, and many critics have already dismissed the spin-off as being dead in the water.
But that’s all a bit negative, right? Shouldn’t we at least give our homegrown SNL cast a fighting chance? With any luck, they’ll have already studied our past attempts and figured out what does and doesn’t get the nation laughing. And if, for some unfathomable reason, they haven’t, we’ve gone and done the hard work for them.
When does Saturday Night Live UK start?
The first-ever episode of SNL UK will be broadcast live around the nation on Saturday 21 March at 10pm. Yep, that’s tomorrow – and you’ll want to make sure you watch it live. This is proper, good ol’ fashioned event television. From then on, the show will air weekly throughout its eight-episode series.
Where can I watch SNL UK?
Sky One and NowTV are your go-to platforms, where each 75-minute episode will air live and be available to watch later.
Who’s in the line-up?
If there’s any reason to believe in SNL UK, it’s the cast. The inaugural line-up features a crack team of stand-up mainstays, Edinburgh Fringe winners, Taskmaster contestants, viral TikTokkers and comedy actors. Which is to say: these guys know what they’re doing.
In the actor lane, there’s This Country’s Celeste Dring, Black Ops’ Hammed Animashaun, Jack Shep from Big Boys and Paddy Young, who you might recognise from Everyone Else Burns. Then, from the stand-up circuit, we have Larry Dean and Ania Magliano, while Annabel Marlow is a West End queen who cut her teeth in Six the Musical.
Ayoade Bamgboye is the woman the award-winning Edinburgh Fringe show Swings and Roundabouts; Emma Sidi is character actor who’s been doing sketch and improv since uni; George Fouracres is comedian who can also take on Hamlet at Shakespeare’s Globe. Finally, there’s Al Nash, the social media star who regularly racks up hundreds of thousands of views.
Of course, it wouldn’t be SNL without celebrity guests – and the lineup for the first three episodes has already been announced. This weekend, SNL OG Tina Fey will help the British cast get things off to a flying start, with Wet Leg on board as the musical guest. Then, in the coming weeks, expect to see Jamie Dornan and Riz Ahmed, alongside Wolf Alice and Kasabian, respectively.
Five past attempts (that failed)
First airing in 1985, the Ben Elton-fronted Saturday Live – later rebranded Friday Night Live – is perhaps the most explicit example of us Brits trying to recreate the SNL magic, even down to the fake window-backed set. Blending standup with wacky sketches and musical performances, the formula was a pretty perfect match, with the likes of Stephen Fry, Hugh Laurie and Lenny Henry all making an appearance. And to be fair, it wasn’t a total flop, running for four series until 1988, and occasionally returning for one-off specials in the years since – the latest of which was in 2022. Still, it didn’t quite have the staying power of the show that provided its blueprint.
The noughties' attempt at bringing raucous comedy to our screens, The Friday Night Project had Alan Carr and Justin Lee Collins at its helm. Each week, they were joined by a different celebrity guest host – and they really brought out the big guns. Mariah Carey, Lily Allen and Sharon Osbourne are just a few of the stars who joined Carr and Collins on the show, throwing banter back and forth, and taking part in campy sketches. It had a pretty good run, airing for three years from 2005, but it didn’t stand the test of time. Carr and Collins eventually got their own shows in 2009, and we never saw them share The Friday Night Project sofa again.
Over five series, this late-nineties iteration saw everyone from Will Smith to Jimmy Carr walk onto its set. But mostly, it’s remembered for bringing the then-relatively unknown Ricky Gervais and Sacha Baron Cohen into the spotlight. The 11 O’Clock Show format was slightly more original than an SNL cut-and-paste job, though. Designed to spoof a late-night news report, it interjected straight-to-camera gags with comedic pre-filmed roaming reports. Sort of like Have I Got News For You, without the game show element.
A Jonathan Ross passion project, Saturday Zoo was created by his own production company with a vision to create “a show that I want to watch”. What did that look like? Celebrity interviews, cutaway sketches and standup performances, with guests like Naomi Campbell and Kylie Minogue. But at the time, Ross was already oversaturated and critics panned it from the get go. As a result, the show only managed 13 episodes – perhaps the most short-lived attempt of all.
Cast your mind back to 2017 and you might remember the (very) brief period when The Nightly Show was airing every weeknight. With a rotating cast of hosts – including Davina McCall, Gordon Ramsay and Dermot O'Leary – this series was modelled more on US chat shows such as Jimmy Kimmel Live! and The Late Show with Stephen Colbert. But it’s notable thanks to how quickly its production turnaround was. Although The Nightly Show wasn’t broadcast live, it was recorded only four hours before airing each day. The catch: it only lasted 39 days.
