The news that a British version of Saturday Night Live was in the offing raised an enormous gestalt groan throughout the land. A US show that was last a reasonable proposition in about 1996, reimagined for the UK? Why stop with SNL – there’s also Home Improvement, Murder She Wrote or Dr Quinn Medicine Woman. The besetting sin of firing Norm Macdonald is a stain from which the American SNL has never truly recovered. This offshoot had the air of a calamity in the making.
The biggest surprise was that SNL UK was quite an upbeat, silly, jolly affair
And the trailer released last week felt like the death of hope. I didn’t think it was possible to make Tina Fey (SNL veteran and host of the first show) unfunny, but they managed it. Worse, the British cast came across as insufferable, a sort of vacuum sapping canker, a convocation of talentless talent vampires.
The trailer took place on the climbing frames and scaffolding beloved of 1970s children’s favourite Why Don’t You? (they should rename this Why Did You?, I thought.) Though in its content, it was more reminiscent of another TV treat of the same vintage, the BBC’s funky Christian kids show The Sunday Gang, all dungarees and painfully strained conviviality.
Assembling totally unfamiliar faces for 75 minutes of live comedy television – this is indeed ambitious, in the same way that attempting to climb Mount Everest wearing court shoes and culottes is ambitious. The trailer swiftly went viral because of its sheer excruciating horror. It’s hard to create a word-picture of how bad it was – a renunciation of the human race, the inevitable triumph of entropy. Ashes in the mouth of a pitiless universe.
When Coffee House asked me to review the first actual episode, I jotted down a few notes; ‘That was weak, that was.’ ‘And now, dead from London.’ ‘Not as good as The Mash Report’, etc.
Still, I had to go in positive. Honestly, I did. I tried to banish the foreboding I felt. I told myself ‘it could be ok. It might even be good. There’s nothing to actually say definitively that it won’t be. Perhaps the marketing people are just idiots (always a consideration with modern television.) Perhaps I’ll be taken by splendid surprise.’ Maybe I would finally get to write one of those columns with a quirky twist – ‘to my astonishment the Lidl Easter egg was by far the best’, ‘some have called it woke but I found it positively Rabelaisian’, you know the kind of thing. I didn’t really, seriously think for a moment that it might be any good.
But – it was quite good. Parts of it were actually good. I laughed several times. There was not a sign of the scaffolding and the performers were amiable and likeable. It’s not fantastic, no – about up to the standard of forgotten also-ran sketch show schedule fillers like Naked Video or Three Of A Kind. But by contemporary British TV comedy standards, that makes it phenomenal.
There are some big issues. It is too long. The inheritance of an ancient American format sits uneasily in the UK, with the whooping and squawking audience very irritatingly un British. The pop guest slot feels like it’s from another, long lost age when anybody cared. (It didn’t help that Wet Leg, the opening group, are just awful.)
Oddly, after a sparkling first part, with an inventive Downing Street sketch and a monologue from Fey – thankfully restored to funny again – it got weaker as it went on. The topical news desk section, an SNL standby, was dreary, but at least not smug or self-satisfied. There are political jokes, but they were even-handed and – thank God – neither superior nor insufferably pleased with itself à la Frankie Boyle, Russell Howard et al. I counted one approving ‘whoop’ from an overexcited audience member at a Trump gag, but that was the only tiny trace of what is known as ‘clapter’ – when the audience applauds or cheers in agreement with a statement, rather than laughing at a joke.
But all the good stuff was up front. The last half hour was merely rather dull, with Shakespeare and Paddington sketches that lingered far too long on the repetition of one rather obvious gag. But still, they were not offensively dull. That feels like a major breakthrough.
Humour is subjective. I’ve always frowned, mildly, when people say that a professional comedian is ‘not funny’, because they must be funny for somebody – mustn’t they? I mean, The Last Leg is as appealing to me as necrotising fasciitis but it does good numbers, at least by contemporary standards.
Are the members of this young cast the next wave of broadcast TV comedians? Probably not, but then I suspect nobody is. TV comedy is merely one among many formerly reliable aspects of British life that just seemed to conk out almost simultaneously about twelve years ago.
Back to SNL UK. How did that trailer happen? We need to know. If I was one of the cast, I would want whoever promoted their show like that subjected to a full judge-led public inquiry with statutory powers.
The biggest surprise was that SNL UK was quite an upbeat, silly, jolly affair. It made the predictable, sneery progressive comedy that’s dominated British TV for far too long seem mean-spirited and old-fashioned. That was the last thing I expected – for which, three cheers. Well, two cheers at least.
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