3 hours ago
11
In the end, it’s a feeling, isn’t it? You can tally up the laughs, work out the ratio of good lines to bad, sketches that fly, sketches that plummet straight into the mire – but in the end, a comedy show leaves you with a feeling that tells you whether it worked or not.
The general feeling, I think, will be that the inaugural episode of Saturday Night Live UK – Sky’s version of the famous 51-year-old American original founded and still overseen by the infamous Lorne Michaels – did work.
Some may feel they – 11 actors and a 20-strong writing team drawn from more than 1,200 applicants – only just got away with it, but others will feel they managed a bit better than that.
It began, either very bravely or very foolishly, with an impression of Keir Starmer, a man who even in parody form (by George Fouracres, the impressionist of the group) can suck the life out of a room, trying to overcome his feelings for Trump (“I can change him!”) and then we were out of the traditional cold open and into the guest host monologue.
Tina Fey, former head writer at SNL before moving into movies and creating 30 Rock, a show about a show very like SNL, did the honours. Like many of the sketches to come and like the episode overall, it started off in stilted fashion (a cameo from a game Nicola Coughlan that didn’t work) but warmed up enough to end – courtesy of a pop quiz from Graham Norton on Britishisms (“Autoshop repair …?” “Autoshop replace!”) – in relative triumph.
Then came one of the stronger sketches, about a skincare range so effective “everyone will think your husband is a nonce!” It’s Undérage, by Pedolay. “He’s lost his record deal,” says one woman, “and some, but not all, of his fans”. It wasn’t alone in going on too long, but that is an SNL tradition almost as longstanding as the cold open.
A bafflingly bloated sketch about David Attenborough’s Last Supper with reanimated icons at least gave us a disturbingly good Diana (Jack Shep), and was followed by two bits that hit their mark much better.
The first had Hammed Animashaun as an unmaliciously honest film critic interviewing two Hollywood stars and unable to understand why “it fucking sucked. All the way through”. In the second he was part of a team dedicated to making the internet “as bad as it can possibly be”. These were followed, perhaps inevitably, by the first real dud of the evening about a woman giving birth to an attention-seeker that was desperately laboured in all senses.
The team pulled it back, however, with a solid Weekend Update presented by Ania Magliano and Paddy Young, which managed what felt in this frightened, cowardly age like some proper jokes for grownups (special props to the “Boris Pistorius/Saddam Walliams” line, the Beckham joke and the one about It’s a Sin becoming a musical “as if a TV show about the Aids crisis could get any gayer”).
A Shakespeare sketch (involving the one area in which we will forever outdo the US – swearing) fared better, for my money, than the Paddington one but were surely equally inevitable. Then an absolute piece of rubbish about a woman getting fitted for a bra and a bonkers but bracing “45 Seconds with Fouracres” in which he cycled through pitch-perfect variations on “What kind of Irish is your grandad?” and we were out.
Oh, and there were two god-awful performances by Wet Leg but let us not dwell.
It could have been a lot, lot worse. And it could have been a lot better. But it is likely to become so as the team and the audience settle in over the coming weeks and we might see some recurring characters and start to build a rhythm and rapport with the show.
And honestly – it felt refreshing to see an ambition/piece of madness like retooling a legacy US brand for this septic isle even being attempted. It did not fail. And in the coming weeks, let’s hope, it can build towards real success.
