Remember me
If it were ours, we’d defend it like vaudeville and variety. England is the home of the music hall and, to look at – I mean this in the most distant possible sense; I’ve obviously never watched it – the American TV show Saturday Night Live fits squarely into that tradition. There are sketches, impressions and funny dances, and satirical discursions and musical interludes. It sounds almost a bit like Morecambe and Wise.
Nevertheless it’s not ours, in fact it’s theirs, and therefore SNL is basically unwatched and unrevered in Britain. In fact, in my own circles, anyone who confesses a liking of Saturday Night Live is confessing to a rogue if not a pariah sense of humour, the sort of deviant who finds Nish Kumar or road accidents funny. And being funny is no joke here. Our last remaining claim of British exceptionalism, the national sense of humour is viciously policed and upheld in offices, playgrounds and pubs across the country on a daily basis.
To have launched a new comedy series before such a testy audience is a brave thing. And Saturday Night Live UK can therefore take some pride in having survived its first outing as: middling, undistinguished, uneven. Far from the disaster we might have chauvinistically hoped for, it was still far from a triumph. After all, this might be the least propitious time to be launching a comedy that depends on shared reference points and national commonalities – and SNL UK suffered beneath that burden.
Even I know that impersonations are a vital part of the American SNL, and we opened with a bad one of Keir Starmer (too breathy and congested, it would have made a passable Rachel Reeves). The sketch saw Starmer failing to stand up to Donald Trump over the telephone, accompanied by David Lammy. And this was the first missed opportunity: Lammy was played straight, despite having one the most hapless and imitable voices in British politics, all italics (“Let me be very clear…”) and factual errors.
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Following the American format, next comes a guest monologue, this one by Tina Fey, who flourished a series of other celebrities (Nicola Coughlan! Michael Cera! Graham Norton!) to keep the energy up. Fey was good enough to admit that “no one really knows why” SNL UK was being made, and the show did find some momentum after that concession. Some of the pre-recorded sketches were really quite good – a fake advert for an anti-ageing cream called “Undérage” and marketed by “Pedolay” was as silly as it was funny. I also liked the immersive Paddington Bear Experience where the luvvie visitors were bloodied by a real grizzly – for the same reason.
But those based in the studio, while necessarily broader, felt contrived and overwrought – like David Attenborough’s dream dinner party of British historical icons, which then transitioned into an orgy. I never need to see Mary Seacole grope Princess Diana’s chest again. And the chatty, news commentary bits felt aimlessly indecent (imagine Prince Andrew getting sexually assaulted in prison, or if Brooklyn Beckham was actually shagging his mum!). That said, I enjoyed the Shakespeare sketch, which saw Will returning to Stratford on breaks from writing in London and becoming slightly more Dalston each time: a “cunty little earring” here, a “slutty little chain” there, and ultimately returning on a Lime bike to accidentally kill Hamnet when he comes across the bag of ketamine hidden in Will’s coinpurse.
All of which makes you wonder whether, for all our pretence of comic superiority, it is British tastes that have narrowed. In the 21st-century, our most acclaimed comedy has been artful, stylised, ironic – think Peep Show, The Office, Fleabag. We’ve developed a national allergy to anything with canned laughter, or sketch shows that close with grinning and dancing, or anything much like vaudeville and variety. But only a few decades ago, television was much hammier. On YouTube I recently came across a guest appearance Harold Wilson made on Morecambe and Wise in the late Seventies: he not only holds his own but seems to be enjoying himself. Programmes like that were part of a cheerful national culture that, without collective audiences or homogenous viewing, is unlikely to return. We think of America as unfathomably more riven and vast than Britain – but they, or at least the portion of their population that likes SNL, seem able to sustain something more like that now. You do start to wonder if the failure of SNL UK, and its absence until this point, might have more to do with the UK than SNL.
[Further reading: The Ladies of London need our help]
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