As the UK version launches, Steve Bennett looks back at where it all started

In Studio 8H in downtown New York, a clock counts down the seconds to 11.30pm – the moment the hippest show on TV starts its live broadcast to ten million homes. But in a corridor outside the dressing room, two of its stars – both on the verge of major Hollywood fame – are involved in a full-on fist fight, liberally, if inexpertly, throwing punches at each other.

The pair, Bill Murray and Chevy Chase, are pulled apart moments before the ‘on air’ sign lights up. Murray spits the witheringly precise insult ‘medium talent’ at his nemesis, who dashes to the stage, flustered, to open the show.

The 1978 bust-up is, perhaps, the most notorious incident in the 51-year, 1,003-episode history of Saturday Night Live - the comedy show that grew from a chaotic start to become an American TV institution, and which launches a British version on Sky One this weekend, with SNL veteran Tina Fey as the first guest host.

Eddie Murphy, John Belushi, Adam Sandler, Kristen Wiig, Robert Downey Jr  and so many more owe their big-screen careers to the show, which has spun off movies including The Blues Brothers and Wayne's World. But behind the on-air laughs lies a darker side, and its chequered history is dogged by drug abuse, accusations of sexual abuse, on-air controversies – and even the lynching of a Muppet. 

The programme started when executives at America’s NBC network handed a little-watched late-night slot to a virtually unknown Canadian producer called Lorne Michaels, reckoning they had nothing to lose. 

Now 81, he is a respected icon of America comedy who will also be overseeing the UK version. But in 1975, he was a magic-mushroom-loving Monty Python fan who had an idea to shake up the ultra-staid world of network TV with a new type of programme to appeal to the burgeoning counter-culture. 

He raided the New York comedy scene for an ensemble of hip young performers  – semi-jokingly called The Not Ready For Primetime Players – including Belushi, Chase, Dan Aykroyd and Gilda Radner. Michaels’ quest to make something different meant employing only ‘enlightened amateurs’, unconstrained by making TV the way it had always been done – and no one over 30.

Recruiting renegades was a recipe for chaos. The ‘talent’ ran amok in the 17th floor of 30 Rockefeller Plaza assigned to them, with one executive at the NBC network likening it to a war zone. The comics were slovenly – with dirty clothes, empty booze bottles piled around –  and prone to practical jokes, such as setting each other’s scripts alight.

Few seemed to knuckle down to the challenge of putting together a 90-minute live show. The Friday run-through for that first show ran for three and a half hours and was, by all accounts, not at all funny. The dress rehearsal on Saturday was also a disaster and the script ripped up and restructured in the hour before going live.  The show was still running too long and at 8pm one guest – an up-and-coming comedian by the name of Billy Crystal – was asked to trim a seven-minute sketch down to two. He refused, and walked. Meanwhile, Belushi was refusing to sign his contact as the minutes to broadcast ticked down.

At the time Michaels had such little faith in the show being ready he was heard saying ‘NBC better have a movie ready, just in case.’ 

The chaos of that first show – fictionalised with heavy liberties in last year’s film Saturday Night – has become the stuff of showbusiness legend. Not that the preparations ever go entirely smoothly, even now. As Michaels has put it: ‘We don’t go on air because we are ready – we are on air because it is 11.30pm.’

The production schedule is gruelling, historically  defined by all-night writing and rewriting sessions going on past dawn fuelled partly by cocaine.

While plenty of the cast and writers from the early days indulged ‘the person that they worried about the most was Chevy,’ James Andrew Miller – who co-wrote an authoritative tome about the show, Live From New York, with Tom Shales – once said. He was doing ‘a lot’ of cocaine.

In a recent documentary about Chase, now 82 and clean for decades, the comedian’s brother, Ned recalls going to a dinner in Los Angeles, where the centrepiece of the table was a lazy Susan with a pyramid of cocaine on it.

Aykroyd and Belushi – who found big screen fame with their SNL characters  The Blues Brothers –were known for their reckless high living, too.  The pair were responsible for the wild after-show parties that ran till sunrise and became the talk of New York. They even bought a seedy venue to host them. They, and later recruit Murray, dominated the show both on screen and off with such a  frat-boy machismo they became dubbed ‘The Bully Boys’.

Belushi was the biggest party animal. Michaels recalled him turning up for one show in February 1979 straight from a heavy bender with Rolling Stones rocker Ronnie Wood. ‘He was coughing, he looked terrible,’ Michaels recalled. The show’s doctor told him Belushi couldn’t perform, which the producer greeted with ‘rage and very little sympathy’.

‘What happens if he does it?’ Michaels asked the medic. ‘Well, he could die’. ‘What are the odds of that?’ ‘50/50,’ ‘I can live with that.’ And the show went on…

Belushi left SNL later that year, his fame having outgrown the show, and by 1982 he was dead, from a fatal combination of heroin and cocaine taken in his room at the Chateau Marmont hotel in Los Angeles.

Aykroyd had his own problems, having a highly-strung personality, which authors Doug Hill and Jeff Weingrad detailing a catalogue of incidents in their definitive book about the show, called Saturday Night. At least twice he lacerated his hand punching glass-covered posters in frustration; after getting a memo about some dubious expenses he spent hours defacing an office wall with graffiti such as: ‘I am Beelzebub… I will kill you’; and utterly trashed his dressing room when he lost his marijuana bong; 

Some of the drug excesses might be ascribed to the lax standards of the 1970s and the progressive wave sweeping urban youth at the time. But SNL rarely seems far from scandal. As recently as January this year, Chris Redd this month admitted to selling prescription pills to fellow SNL comedians before leaving the show in 2022. ‘While I was at the show, I had some pill issues,’ he said in a video he posted on Instagram. ‘I was even selling some to people, some of my castmates.’ 

While Tracy Morgan was on SNL between 1996 and 2003 he became notorious for his after-show parties, running till dawn in an illegal strip club called the Loft that featured sex workers and free-flowing booze. ‘You’d walk in there and get your dick sucked, there was usually some fucking going on,’ the comedian admitted in his memoir. When some cast members came they were shocked by what they saw and quickly made their excuses, but Morgan insisted the stagehands loved it.

The comedian’s erratic behaviour was parodied on the sitcom 30 Rock – set backstage on a show very much like SNL – in which he played an exaggerated version of himself alongside series creator  Fey, herself a former SNL star and head writer and short-lived visitor to one of those after-parties.

The private debauchery was thrust into the public realm in 2021 when one woman accused comedian  Horatio Sanz of sexually assaulting her at a party 19 years earlier. The case was settled out of court.

But the show’s lowest ebb possibly came with with a comedian called Chris Farley.  He was a cast member in the early 1990s,  collaborating with the likes of Chris Rock and Adam Sandler in a group dubbed The Bad Boys of SNL, famed for off-screen pranks… and worse. In 1994 a female extra accused Farley of groping her, but no charges were brought.

Farley battled alcohol and drug addiction as well as obesity and Michaels – still remembering the problems he had with Belushi – constantly threatened to fire him unless he cleaned up his act. He made at least 17 attempts and in 1995 he was axed as part of a general shake-up of the cast.

Two years later he was invited back as a guest host. But it was not a triumphant return. His health had taken a serious turn for the worse. He was a wreck. The episode was real car-crash TV as he struggled with his lines, even moving seemed a struggle. Producers were accused of exploiting his issues for ratings as a curious audience tuned in to witness his decline. 

He was dead a few weeks later by an overdose of cocaine and heroin – the same ‘speedball’ combination that had claimed Belushi’s life. Both stars were 33 years old when they died.

Saturday Night – as it was initially called –  was not an instant ratings hit, and ran at big losses every episodes as advertisers stayed away. Yet it steadily built up a fan base (a luxury the UK version won’t have, as it’s only running for six episodes), firstly mostly among the students, freak and hippies it was aimed at.

Making the most of the early success was Chase, who emerged as the first big star of the show, to the chagrin of the others who saw it as more of a collaborative endeavour.

He never really fitted in anyway, thanks his ambition and middle-class upbringing. He was said to be one of the first to use cocaine because he could afford to, while his consumption was such that he would ‘swing at times between megalomania and paranoia’.

Chase was feted for other work – even touted as a successor for talk show king Johnny Carson, even though the colossus of American broadcasting held SNL in contempt, sneering that the cast ‘couldn’t ad-lib a fart at a bean-eating contest’.

Amid such attention – and at the insistence of his girlfriend who wanted him to join her in Los Angeles – Chase left midway through the second season of SNL, catching Michaels off guard and to the lasting chagrin of everyone else working there ‘Scumbag’ is one of the more printable verdicts about him. 

In 1978, Chase returned to the show to guest host an episode, unaware of how much bad blood he had left and throwing his weight around. (The picture above shows a publicity shot from this episode with Chase, second from left, with cast members, from right, Laraine Newman, Gilda Radner, Bill Murray and Jane Curtin) It was left to Murray, by now one of the Not Ready For Prime Time Players, to confront him about how much he was hated.

Blues Brothers director John Landis, who was there that night, later said: ‘It was a huge altercation. They were big guys and really going at it… slapping at each other, screaming at each other, calling each other terrible names.’

Murray reportedly told Chase: ‘Go fuck your wife, she needs it,’ while Chase likened Murray’s pock-marked face to ‘a landing spot for Neil Armstrong’. Belushi got between them and took most of the blows, and the brawl broke up just before the show went to air. The pair subsequently played down the ferocity of the argument and, indeed, 18 months later were filming the comedy Caddyshack together without apparent incident. 

Chase wasn’t the only fixture to leave the show early. The Land of Gortch, a recurring sketch featuring puppets made by Sesame Street creator Jim Henson as he tried to move into adult comedy. Poorly received by audiences, it lasted little over one series.

The hip writers hated working with the ‘little hairy facecloths’, with one harrumphing: ‘I don’t write for felt’. They often clashed heads with Henson, who was notoriously precious about his creations. Indeed one writer strung up a Big Bird puppet by a Venetian blind cord, like a lynching, to make a point. Not long after this debacle, Henson headed to the UK to launch The Muppet Show.

Over the first four seasons the show went from strength to strength, its audiences growing to more than 25million households, and its budgets rising to match. Which meant more money for cocaine. 

Sources told authors Hill and Weingrad that by season 4 ‘a good 65 per cent of non-technical staff’ used the drug – though not Murray nor fellow cast members  Jane Curtin.

They wrote in their book: ‘Coke became the drug of choice on Saturday Night for several reasons. People had the money to pay for it now and it was immensely useful in keeping them live and kicking when fatigue was wearing them down. Cocaine is also the drug of success and ambition.’

But one performer took it for a very different reason:  Garrett Morris, who was on the show from the start and was its first black cast member (and at 89 is its oldest living alumnus), grew frustrated at first at the lazy stereotypical roles he was asked to play, and subsequently that he hadn’t achieved the superstardom of colleagues like Belushi.

He freebased cocaine, giving him acute paranoia and hallucinations. A low point was during rehearsals for a show hosted by Kirk Douglas, when he burst onto the set, stripped to his waist and started ranting about the ‘invisible hypnotist robot’ that was watching him.

SNL has also faced accusations it treated women badly, too. Original writer Anne Beatty told Live From New York’s authors that it was a boys’ club and that ‘the only entrée to that boys’ club was basically by fucking somebody in the club. Either you had to be somebody's girlfriend or, sadly and frequently, then you'd be somebody's ex-girlfriend.’ She also once described the work-hard party-hard ethos of the early days as ‘a combination of summer camp and concentration camp’. 

Julia Louis-Dreyfus, who went on to star in political comedy Veep, said her stint on the show in the 1980s was ‘miserable… It was very sexist.’  Janeane Garofalo, a cast member in the 1990s before starring in movies such as The Truth About Cats & Dogs, said her experience on the show left her ‘anxious and depressed’ and hated the ‘fraternity hazing’ she was subjected to.

Just last year a ‘mean and unfunny’ joke about the teeth of White Lotus star Aimee Lou Wood was slated for being sexist, just the latest in a long string of on-air controversies, the most notable surely being when Sinead O’Connor tore up a photo of  Pope John Paul II in 1992.

The show has faced numerous claims of making bad-taste jokes, especially about paedophilia,  Wayne’s World duo Mike Myers and Dana Carvey mocked Chelsea Clinton’s appearance when she was just 12 and more latterly, Kanye West appearing in a Make America Great Again hat did not go down well with the liberal studio audience.

Yet despite all this, 51 years after its debut, SNL has gone from scrappy rebel project to revered American TV institution. Almost since the start, critics have sniped that it’s not as funny as it used to be, but it still reaches around 8million viewers a week in the US, and countless more via social media, and is particularly popular with sought-after, but hard-to-reach younger audience.

The production remains a juggernaut, costing a reported  $4 million (£3million) per episode to produce, each episode requiring around 150 costumes, 80 wigs, and dozens of sets each week –  along with salaries for a large crew and cast, and Michaels sizeable salary, estimated to be more than $30million (£22million) a year.

Sky’s endeavour, which starts at 10pm on Saturday, will be made on a fraction of the budget and runs for just eight episodes, but the broadcaster will be hoping the much-anticipated British version grabs the headlines, viewers and social media attention in the same way the original still does. But hopefully for all the right reasons… 

• For more on the history of Saturday Night Live,  we recommend Saturday Night: A Backstage History Of Saturday Night Live, by Doug Hill and Jeff Weingrad;  and Live From New York: The Complete, Uncensored History Of Saturday Night Live As Told By Its Stars, Writers, And Guests by Tom Shales and James Andrew Miller. Both definitive tomes are available from Amazon, with the latter also available from uk.bookshop.org, below, which supports independent bookstores.  

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Published: 20 Mar 2026