Why has Saturday Night Live always been rejected by the UK?
Saturday Night Live: pourquoi un tel rejet au Royaume-Uni?
Une émission culte qui a du mal à s’exporter
Créée en 1975, Saturday Night Live est une véritable institution aux Etats-Unis. Savant mélange de sketchs entrecoupés de shows musicaux, cette émission de télévision, qui parodie allégrement la culture et la politique américaines chaque semaine, a vu émerger quelques-uns des plus grands humoristes du pays. Malgré son succès, Saturday Night Live n’a jamais trouvé son public au Royaume-Uni. Décryptage d’un phénomène peut-être pas si culte.
If you’re from the UK, you will have seen a Saturday Night Live sketch. Possibly “Dick in a Box”, or Natalie Portman rapping. Or more recently, when James Corden dressed up as Boris Johnson, or when Harry Styles said incredibly homoerotic things about bread. You will not have seen Saturday Night Live.
2. The long-running US sketch show is internationally famous, ubiquitous on YouTube every Sunday morning for nine months of the year. But the show in its entirety has almost never been broadcast in the UK. As Sky Comedy makes a stab at bringing it to our screens, it’s worth asking why
SNL is one of the few American institutions to absolutely never work across the pond.
A POP CULTURE FIXTURE
3. Much of the American comedy we know and love stems from Saturday Night Live. Created by Lorne Michaels in 1975, it has been comfortably ensconced in the fabric of American culture ever since. Every week, its rotating teams of writers pool resources to craft topical sketches that flirt with the ludicrous and the damning, broadcasting live at midnight on Saturday nights.
4. Its relationship with the zeitgeist has fluctuated over the years, peaking in the Eighties (with cast members including Eddie Murphy and Chevy Chase), declining in the Nineties (with stars including Will Ferrell and Molly Shannon), but rising again under the guidance of Tina Fey in the Noughties, who became the show’s first female head writer. 5. It was the birthplace of all of the above names, as well as Bill Murray, Adam Sandler, Amy Poehler, Jim Belushi, Dan Aykroyd, Chris Rock, Andy Samberg and Kristen Wiig. It spawned The Blues Brothers, Wayne’s World and much of the cinematic humour of the last three decades – everything political, surreal and incredibly silly that you’ve laughed at on film and television can in some way be traced back to the show.
6. Unless you happened to tune into ITV4 in the early hours back in 2006, Saturday Night Live as an hour-long spectacle may have flown over your head. That was when SNL was last launched in the UK, with episodes broadcast weeks after they were originally shown – meaning topical material suddenly felt incredibly out-of-date. It unsurprisingly bombed, until it was finally put out of its misery in mid-2008.
7. That may have been a mistake. The 34th season of the show, beginning in September 2008, pro
pelled Saturday Night Live back into the headlines, assisted by a landmark US election and Fey’s Emmy-winning, internet-breaking turn as vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin. A decade on, SNL’s arrival in the UK coincides with a less sterling reputation for the show.
8. In recent years, SNL has been criticised for the lack of representation in its new cast members, weathered the loss of high-profile stars including Aidy Bryant and Kenan Thompson, and fought accusations of irrelevance and illjudgement. The decision to allow Donald Trump to host an episode of the show during his election year has been regularly mooted as the moment the show lost its credibility. Outside of Kate McKinnon and the soon-departing Leslie Jones, few of the show’s current cast members have become
Much of the American comedy we know and love stems from Saturday Night Live.
independently famous outside of it – Pete Davidson, still best known as Ariana Grande’s one-time squeeze, is a tabloid favourite but barely appears on the show itself.
9. Such low star-wattage may prove an obstacle to the UK taking to it. It’s also arriving on our shores at a time in which sketch comedy has become unusually dormant in the UK. Attempts have occasionally been made to replicate the Saturday Night Live format here, but to little success.
10. In 2013, The Fast Show’s Charlie Higson suggested that the rise (and comparable cheapness) of comedy panel shows had sounded the death knell for the traditional sketch show in the UK. “[We don’t have] a large mainstream show where you hear a catchphrase and know exactly what it is,” he told the Radio Times. “We haven’t had one like that since Little Britain.”
AN INVESTMENT
11. “I’m not sure viewers themselves have fallen out of love with them, but broadcasters 100% have,” Boosley says. “They’re so expensive to make. If you think about an SNL hour and each of those sets alone – you need five or six locations, and multiple actors. It’s just really, really expensive. People aren’t watching TV as much as they were in the old days, and it means it’s hard for [broadcasters] to justify their budgets. It’s also a risk, because people have different tastes in comedy. If you don’t get a sketch right, it’s a very expensive day out for no one laughing.” He suggests that sketch comedy still thrives on UK radio, but that it may be an uphill battle for Saturday Night Live to drive viewership to Sky Comedy on reputation alone.
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