You may or may not be surprised to learn that Saturday Night Live has launched a slew of copycat shows overseas, with comic ensembles in Spain, France, Italy, and Japan looking to imitate the success and live-theater energy of the American show while making humor that resonates with their own audience. Most of those shows were short-lived, although Saturday Night Live Korea is still going after 17 seasons.
What makes Sky TV’s Saturday Night Live UK different is that their comedians speak our language, so there’s a greater chance of us Americans appreciating their humor. (Still, check out SNL Korea’s take on the “Taco Town” sketch using kimbap. You won’t need a word of Korean to understand it.)
One of the first things you’ll notice is that though the British program has a Weekend Update segment, it’s much shorter than the one in the American version. Anchors Ania Magliano and Paddy Young don’t interact much — could lack of chemistry be the cause? — but the segment comes off as refreshingly focused. Following the controversy over Ed Sheeran’s American tour, the anchors fired off a series of jokes mean enough that Sheeran likely won’t be a musical guest on the show in the foreseeable future. They have continued to target the singer as well as Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, which has made the segment sharper than its American counterpart.
The focus rubs off on the desk guests as the kid-friendly frozen food mascot Captain Birdseye (Al Nash) comes on to tout his plan to reopen the Strait of Hormuz, which focuses relentlessly on frozen seafood: “I’ve slit open a Serbian mercenary’s throat with a machete and watched the wound yawn open hot and steaming, like a split fish finger!”
His turn ends before the character wears out his welcome — and also before Nash’s fake mustache falls off.
The TV show aims its humor specifically at British viewers, and sometimes that can be a mixed blessing. The “Operation Grumthorpe” sketch will make no sense to you unless you watched the BBC kids’ TV show Noel’s House Party in the 1990s. Sometimes the stupid jokes are the ones that hit, like the parody of The X Factor, which features one singing contestant (played by episode host Jamie Demetriou) whose 6-foot-tall hairdo becomes caught in the crane rig. As a result, he gets whipped around the stage as the camera operator tries to shake free of his hair.
The show is best when it hits a sweet spot, as in a music video called “Pub Song,” where the cast members parody British tourists who travel to Spain for vacation but only want to eat the same food and hang out with one another at pubs just like the ones back home. If you’ve ever been to Western Europe in the summer, you know how true that is. Over a fake Spanish beat, the cast members and episode host Jamie Dornan drop bars: “We’re flexin’, Brexitin’ / No Spanish in my lexicon / I’m wearin’ a sombrero even though these things are Mexican.”
In a later episode, host Ncuti Gatwa joins the show’s Black cast members (Hammed Animashaun and Ayoade Bamgboye) to portray a gospel choir that rakes in cash by performing at racist white institutions in need of good PR. A museum director (Emma Sidi) extols the ensemble: “Having Birds of Praise sing among hundreds of stolen artifacts essentially says it’s OK! It’s good, we’ve done this!”
Meanwhile, the choir director seeks out white artists for the group to cover and dismisses both Coldplay and Phil Collins as too Black.
The show’s most biting political humor came during the tenure of former Prime Minister Keir Starmer, whom weird-looking George Fouracres played as a sniveling weakling. The character delivered the first lines in the show’s history: “Golly, what if Donald shouts at me again?” The show needs more of this — the British royal family is a big freaking target right now, and yet the sketch about Prince Andrew circa 1997 (Jack Shep) agreeing on a 29-year plan to soil his own reputation by befriending Jeffrey Epstein was one of those sketches that was probably funnier in the writers’ room than in performance. The same goes for the sketch where Manchester-accented current Prime Minister Andy Burnham (also Fouracres) welcomed fellow Mancs Liam and Noel Gallagher (Shep and Freddie Meredith) to 10 Downing Street, though I’ll admit I laughed out loud when Burnham told the Oasis founders, “I’m a huge fan of your albums and not just the good ones.”
The closest SNL UK has come to a breakout character came this past week, with “Debra Moves,” starring Sidi as a yoga instructor who gives her students incomprehensible instructions. Debra’s Slavic accent may be unplaceable, but the character still feels like it’s based on a very specific real-life person as she utters her catchphrase: “First we gonna interlace our hands and press forward. Don’t do it, don’t do it yet! Then the right leg gonna go over the left. Don’t do it!”
The show needs that one viral sketch that makes everyone on both sides of the Atlantic forward the YouTube link to their friends telling them that they have to see it. That hasn’t come yet, nor can it be forced. Much like governments, Saturday Night Live’s success depends on how the show responds to external events. A funny video on a hot-button issue or a pop-culture phenomenon would help the show on its long road to equaling the original’s success.
