PM wanted to adopt the US model of making loads of episode

David Cameron once personally asked Tina Fey to come to the UK to change the way the British TV comedy industry works.

The 30 Rock creator revealed that she was summoned to a meeting with him at NBC’s New York headquarters while he was still Prime Minister.

There he tried to lure her to the UK to persuade broadcasters to adopt the American comedy model,of making numerous series of 20-plus episodes each, rather than the traditional British process of having a single creator pen six or eight episodes. 

Speaking to Graham Norton at the Edinburgh TV festival yesterday, Fey revealed: ‘I was way out in Brooklyn working on this show called Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt  – I very proud of that show, and I was very happy to take a break from being on camera, jeans and dirty hair every day and happy about it.

‘And I got this call from someone at NBC that said if you could come into Rockefeller Centre, David Cameron is here and has requested to meet you. He was the current prime minister. Turned out all it was, was he wanted to meet me and say hi.

‘He did invite me to come over, but I didn’t come. He was like "Would you ever be willing to come and meet with some of our incredibly talented British showrunners. I think that our television that we make is one of our greatest exports, it’s something we do beautifully and could you convince them to make hundreds of episodes?’

She added that she wouldn’t have been a great advocate to the change in any case, saying: ‘I cannot because we all want to do it the way they [the British] do it. Remember that time Ricky Gervais made 12 half hours…’

Fey also reveals that  30 Rock was originally going to be about a TV news channel – until network executives told her that current affairs was ‘too depressing’.

She said the first version focussed only on her character Liz’s relationship with right-winger Jack, as played by Alec Baldwin. 

‘The first version of it I pitched, was similar in core, but it was set in the world of cable news, and it was really just Jack and Liz.

‘And the original Jack was almost like a Bill O'Reilly type of conservative on-camera person who was paired with this liberal in some kind of revamp, and that they would butt heads.

‘I pitched it to Kevin Reilly, who was the head of NBC at the time –  this is 2005 – and he was like "Oh, the news is s, so depressing. No one wants to think about the news."

‘Just you wait!’ Fey joked.

Reilly  told her to ‘write more about what you know’ – which led her to draw on her time as Saturday Night Live’s head writer.

She said: ‘I personally was very reluctant to write about TV but I always did love The Larry Sanders Show, and  once I figured that instead of just these two people, if it's this triangle with Tracy Jordan and Jack Doherty and Liz Lemon, then you'll have some interesting combinations. And that ended up as how we pitched it.’

Fey used many 30 Rock writers on latest hit, adapting the 1981 Alan Alda film The Four Seasons into an eight-part series – but said that moving from a  script tightly packed with gags to a more naturalistic comedy-drama was difficult.

She said: ‘It was a real exercise in keeping it straight. Like okay in this universe, if we meet another character, they have to be normal.’

In 30 Rock, she said, even a minor character like a postman would be given a ma character trait like ‘oh, you murdered your parents’ or that  a box of cereal in the background could be ‘a set of 50 jokes of their own, which I love doing’.

She added: ’It felt like it was worthwhile to see if we could tell a story, and for all of us to be like. "So be like. So this scene is not going to end on a joke. It's just gonna end?"

Fey also said it was ‘super intimidating’ to  join Saturday Night Live in 1997 as it was ‘pretty male’ and ‘something that I had grown up watching’. Three years later she an Jimmy Fallon took over the Weekend Update slot from Colin Quinn. 

She explained how sketches would be written very late Tuesday night ahead of a table read with the cast and guest host. 

Suggesting the late-night culture was a macho male trait she added: ‘Here’s a dirty secre. You don’t have to do it that way, You could start in the morning.'

But she said: ‘The other crazy thing about SNL is the writers have complete autonomy. You can always write whatever you want. It may not get picked.’

And she said her job as head writer was to ‘make this person's vision the best version of it’ – but the original writer could still reject her suggestions.

Published: 23 Aug 2025