Part one, the sketches. By Lorcan Mullan

It should come as no surprise that Sky announcing a British version of the 50-year American institution Saturday Night Live was greeted with the usual ‘American shows don’t work in Britain/British shows don’t work in the US, as long as you ignore all the ones that have’ articles.

I have been fascinated by SNL as a cultural phenomenon for a long time, but wouldn’t describe myself as a fan of the show. I believe there are four main hurdles the UK SNL will have to jump in order to have a chance of being a success.

I have to start with the biggest problem that the producers will face.

1. SNL is mostly bad and always has been

No single line has better described the feeling of watching many SNL sketches than in The Simpsons’ episode Brother From Another Planet, when Krusty the Clown is hosting a familiar-looking show called Tuesday Night Live. After the first joke in the opening Big Ear Family sketch is greeted with silence, Krusty lets out a a long groan and grumbles ominously: ‘This goes on for twelve more minutes!’

Instead of any sketch show, I’d say the closest equivalent to SNL we have here are  our long-running soap operas. Both SNL in the US and Coronation Street and EastEnders in the UK have flourished for decades. Great writers, directors, and actors have cut their teeth in TV drama by working on shows such as Corrie and EastEnders. Yet despite the talent, those soaps have often provided some of the worst writing, directing and acting that has been seen on primetime British TV.

Soap operas have to churn out three or more episodes every week of the year. Therefore a writer has no time to provide more than one or two hastily written drafts, and directors and actors have few takes in cramped sets that don’t allow for much in the way of creative blocking or acting flourishes. A compressed period of time to produce a large output will always negatively affect quality.

SNL is a 90-minute long show that averages twenty episodes per year. That means, after ads and music, approximately 1,200 minutes of sketches are written, rehearsed, and performed per season. 

The host has to give their OK to every sketch that they appear in, and hosts usually appear in nearly every sketch. This means a sketch can be no more than a concept in a writer’s head until that week’s host approves the pitch. The live format, and a limited number of sets that can be fit into the hallowed Studio 8H, means this is a show defined by tightness. The irony of that is that nearly every live sketch feels stretched out beyond its natural breaking point.

The show’s structure requires most sketches to take up the entirety of a segment between ad breaks. That will usually fluctuate between six to ten minutes.  Back in the mid-1970s the length could be even longer. 

In the UK, especially post-Fast Show, the length of a sketch rarely goes beyond two minutes, either on TV or online,  where the sketch format has seen the most success in recent years. If the UK SNL maintains the US format, that may mean stretching sketches even longer as we have fewer commercial breaks per hour.

SNL never had to adapt too much to changes in the TV landscape, just as Coronation Street is still cobbled and everything in Walford seems to be based around market stalls, one pub, and the manned laundrette (I may be wrong there, I haven’t watched either show in years).

The shows became such an institution that they didn’t have to change with prevailing trends. Corrie debuted at a time when there were only two channels to choose from in the UK. EastEnders had the relatively unenviable task of premiering when there were four.

When SNL started there were more channels, but nowhere near what there is now, and on that late timeslot on a Saturday the options were even more limited.

This breathing space, and a relatively naïve audience when it comes to comedy that pushed the envelope, meant SNL had the time and unchallenged share for attention that allowed it to flourish and feel genuinely revolutionary for its time.

It also meant people would wax nostalgic for the next 49 seasons about how the show was never as good as it used to be. The first five seasons are still held up to this day as the show at its cultural peak, and implied as its quality peak as well.

I suggest you watch the first sketch that SNL aired. In the recent Jason Reitman film Saturday Night, it was treated with the sort of reverence in which Salieri held Mozart’s music when he read it for the first time in Amadeus.  The sketch is awful. A failed attempt at writing Python-esque surreal dialogue with an uninspired non-sequitur punchline. 

Try watching the ‘classic’ superhero party sketch from season four. I’ll be shocked if you make it through the whole eleven minutes. 

Give a watch to the supposed all-timer ‘Star Trek’ parody, also from season one, and tell me your laugh-per-minute ratio. 

That’s not to say there weren’t great sketches from that era, or that those sketches weren’t truly groundbreaking at the time, but if there’s one area that the UK cast and writers shouldn’t feel daunted in matching their American counterparts, it should be in the quality of the sketches.

The short period of time for a sketch to go from conception to performance also means not only does it not get tested and honed after multiple performances in rehearsals and previews, it also requires the biggest frustration for many who watch SNL – the use of cue cards. 

The performers nearly never hold a sight line to their scene partners because they have to read from large boards of text being held up behind the cameras. It prevents a sketch from feeling alive. It reminds me of Paul Merton's brutal assessment of Angus Deayton's job on Have I Got News for You, which he summarised as 'reading out loud’.

It helps explain why such a large percentage of the sketches are based around either game shows or panel discussions where looking slightly off-camera seems more natural. If you’ve grown up on the charm of the SNL format it just seems to be accepted as part of process. A charming slice of amateurism. Like the wobbly sets on Crossroads.

A UK audience has no inherent nostalgic acceptance for an amateur presentation like this, and most won’t indulge the UK show with their time if it tries to do the same.

 If someone tunes into SNL UK for the first time, having never watched the American show, and the opening sketch has any whiff of The Big Ear Family about it, then the viewing figures will take a nose dive well before the twelve-minute mark of the first episode.

Solution: To avoid cue cards as much as possible, the writers should try to be in earlier communication with most of their hosts well before the week of their hosting, working on the script and rehearsing and blocking, allowing the host to just fit into the scene like an actor taking over a role in a long-running West End play.

The producers should also try to exert more authority over what is on the show, ahead of the host’s whims. More than one sketch per segment, with the host only appearing in one of them (or if a costume change can work within how each sketch is structured, maybe two). 

Take advantage of sketch performers they’ve hired beforehand to perform some of their proven successful sketches from their live act in every episode. The performers will have them memorised without a need for cue cards, and everyone involved will have more faith that what they’re performing will work with the live audience, both in the studio and at home. The faster pace will help hold audience’s attention too.
 

A four-part guide to making sure the British SNL isn't a flop

Part 1: The sketches (this article)
Part 2: The hosts
Part 3: The cast
Part 4: The expectations

Published: 17 Apr 2025