If it were ours, we would protect it as vaudeville and variety. England is the home of the music hall, and, to look at it—I mean it in the most distant possible sense; I certainly never did EXAMINED it – the American television show Saturday Night Live fits squarely in that tradition. There are skits, funny impressions and dances, and satirical discourses and musical interludes. Sounds almost a bit like Morecambe and Wise.
It’s not ours though, actually it is theirsand therefore SNL it is largely unwatched and underappreciated in Britain. In fact, in my circles, anyone who confesses that they like it Saturday Night Live is telling of a trickster, if not a wicked sense of humor, the kind of deviant that Nish Kumar finds or funny road accidents. And being funny is no joke here. Our last claim to British exceptionalism, the national sense of humor is ferociously controlled and maintained in offices, playgrounds and pubs across the country every day.
Launching a new comedy series in front of such a seasoned audience is a brave thing to do. AND Saturday Night Live UK therefore it can be proud that it survived its first outing as: mediocre, indistinguishable, 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 opportune time to launch a comedy that depends on common points of reference and national commonalities – and SNL UK suffered under that burden.
I too know that imitations are a vital part of being American SNLand we opened with a bad Keir Starmer (very breathy and compressed, would have made a passable Rachel Reeves). The sketch saw Starmer fail to challenge Donald Trump over the phone, accompanied by David Lammy. And this was the first missed opportunity: Lammy was played straight, despite having one of the most unlucky and imitable voices in British politics, all cursive (“Let me be very clear…”) and factual errors.
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Following the American format, a guest monologue follows, this one from Tina Fey, who brought in a host of other personalities (Nicola Coughlan! Michael Cera! Graham Norton!) to keep the energy up. Fey was nice enough to admit that “no one really knows why” SNL UK was being made and the show gained momentum after that release. Some of the pre-recorded skits were actually quite good – a fake advertisement for an anti-aging cream called “Undérage” and sold by “Pedolay” was as silly as it was funny. I also enjoyed the diving The Paddington Bear Experience where luvvie visitors were bloodied by a real grizzly – for the same reason.
But those set in the studio, while necessarily more expansive, felt contrived and overwrought – like David Attenborough’s dream dinner with British historical icons, which then devolved into an orgy. I don’t need to see Mary Seacole touching Princess Diana’s breasts anymore. And the chatty, news commentary bits felt aimlessly inappropriate (imagine Prince Andrew being sexually assaulted in prison, or if Brooklyn Beckham was actually groping his mother!). That said, I loved the Shakespeare sketch where Will returns to Stratford after a writing break in London and becomes a little more Dalston each time: a “strange little earring” here, a “torn little chain” there, and finally returns on a Lime bike to accidentally kill Hamnet when he comes across the bag of perch hidden in Wijamine’sden.
It all makes you wonder if, for all our claim to comic superiority, it’s British tastes that have narrowed. In the 21st century, our most acclaimed comedy has been artistic, stylized, ironic – think Peep Show, The office, Phlebaba. We have developed a national allergy to anything with canned laughs, or sketch shows that close with smiles and dancing, or anything resembling vaudeville and variety. But just a few decades ago, television was much louder. On YouTube I recently came across a guest appearance that Harold Wilson did Morecambe and Wise in the late seventies: he not only holds his own, but seems to be enjoying himself. Such programs were part of a joyful national culture that, without a collective audience or homogeneous viewing, is unlikely to return. We think of America as vastly more divided and broad than Britain – but they, or at least the part of their population that like SNL, seems able to hold something more like that now. You begin to wonder if the failure of SNL UKand his absence to this point, may have more to do with the UK than SNL.
(Further reading: The ladies of London need our help)
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