Why comedians want the UK 'Saturday Night Live'

0:02Sky News, the full story first.

0:12America's been laughing at itself on Saturday nights for 50 years. Now it's Britain's turn to have a go in the form of Saturday Night Live UK. And this is why.

0:28Hi everyone, Neil here and as we head into the weekend I thought we could all do with a laugh so how about a bit of Saturday Night Live for more than 50 years the show has been entertaining audiences around the world from the NBC studios in New York Quick presidential update I'm doing quite well, thank you I'd like to begin with a list of complaints People are mean to me. Joe here is very mean. Chris Wallace is mean. The economy is mean. He keeps losing jobs, which is mean to me. Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem has been fired.

1:08Wait, what? Why? Was it spending$220 million of taxpayer money on an ad campaign where she dressed up like Jesse from Toy Story? SNL's hugely successful mix of comedy, political satire, music, and more has turned plenty of comedians into global celebrities. And now it's coming to the UK. A British version launches this weekend with a brand new cast and SNL alumnus Tina Fey as the guest host. Oh, I wanted to take a break from my full-time career of writing things on Facebook to fly down her and lend my support to the next president of the United States, Don J. Trump.

1:58Hey, America, isn't she great? Just the total package. Smart, legs, yelling, everything. So why has SNL proved so popular for so long? And what might we expect when it has a distinctly British flavor? Coming up, we've got the comedian Rosie Holt with her take on the launch. But first, John Schneider, creator and host of the Saturday Night Network podcast. John, look, just for the uninitiated, for those who haven't encountered it before, what exactly is Saturday Night Live? Saturday Night Live began in 1975, so 51 years ago. It began as NBC's Saturday Night, where Lorne Michaels had this great idea to find great comedic minds out of obscurity, bring them onto live television and have them work with some of the biggest stars in the world so that they one day could become the biggest stars in the world.

2:51So we had this seven-person cast with a lot of names you may have heard of nowadays, which, you know, Chevy Chase and John Belushi, Dan Aykroyd, Gilda Radner, who all came onto the show in the 70s and were fantastic. So how big is it? I mean, just how much of a shadow has it cast over US culture in the 50 plus years of its existence? I think there's an argument that it has cast a large shadow in waves. I would say that there was eras of the show that have become extremely popular. And the greatness of the show is that it's constantly reinventing itself. It became the place that people would go to find the stars of tomorrow.

3:29And then you felt as a viewer invested in it because you were like, hey, I knew Eddie Murphy before he was Eddie Murphy. I knew Will Ferrell before he was Will Ferrell. And you get that through watching the show. But bearing in mind that clearly, of course, you are a fan. What is so good about SNL? Well, I'm a big sports fan. And I'm sure a lot of your listeners are as well. We may love different sports from being from different parts of the world. But I feel like Saturday Night Live is one of the greatest sports on earth. I really do. I think that you get these comedic minds in there. And there is this competitive aspect to the show where every one of them wants to get on air.

4:04And not everyone will or not everyone's sketches will. So there is this process that they go through throughout the week that is just fascinating to me of everyone is trying to produce these sketches and they will get cut down. And the brilliance of the show is that despite its competitiveness, despite the wanted factor for any of the cast members to be like, hey, I want to be on TV as much as possible. You are forced to work in an ensemble to get on television. You're forced to build alliances with writers who will help write for you, other cast members you have chemistry with. So there is a lot of nuance to this show that I think is extremely fascinating that for someone who hasn't seen it before may be looking at it differently than is just the show funny or not.

4:47The role of the host is fascinating to me. Do they let themselves be played up to? Do they have jokes made at their own expense? What's really cool about this show is that it's different every week. We really don't know. Sometimes the hosts are brilliant and they'll come out and they will just be as if they could be cast members. I think back to Justin Timberlake. He was a guy who was from NSYNC. Everyone thought he was this teeny bopper. And he had this charisma and swagger to him that he just felt so ingrained in the format that he became one of the greatest hosts ever. and you know there is a aspect of like everybody wants to do Saturday Night Live well once you do it most celebrities say this is the greatest week of their lives.

5:28In terms of the the UK version I mean there is a link of course across the Atlantic in in the shape of the host Tina Fey one of the biggest names I'd say to have to have come out of SNL. Tina was such a great choice you know a lot of people will probably say well why didn't they pick a Brit to host the premiere if it's going to be a UK version of Saturday Night Live. I think we're living in a world of social media where everyone can watch sketches, everyone can get involved with the process of Saturday Night Live. It's not like it was 10 or 20 years ago where you couldn't see the show and you just heard what was happening.

5:56We all want to see what is going to be happening this weekend for the premiere of SNL UK. So I think having Tina there provides a link for fans. And Tina is a great story. She is somebody who came into the show in the late 90s as a writer. So she wasn't hired as a cast member originally. And this is at a time where we had some great women in the cast, but they weren't dominating in the way that they would go on to be. And Tina is somebody who really vouched for women. As soon as she became a writer, she pitched sketches that were parodying The View, where you had all female panelists together on a show.

6:29It's called Loose Women in This Country. Oh, okay. All right. All right. So she did a Loose Women parody back in the 90s that, you know, most people remember as being like an important step of like, hey, we only got women in this sketch. Like, that's pretty good. John, do you think it will work, this side of the Atlantic? The reason I ask is so often I have heard from people in and around comedy, you know, look, American sensibilities are different to British sensibilities, that there is a different style of humor. I'm not entirely convinced by that, but I'm wondering about your thought. I have a unique perspective on this where I don't think the show wins on funny.

6:59Like, I don't think you're going to ever be successful because people find the show funny or not, because funny is so subjective. I think generally you want people to find the show funny. But like I said, there's a lot of nuance to this show that I think is fascinating, that if you are willing to dive into the lore of the show, the process of the show, how these things get put together. And I do believe that people who watch the show that way, and they don't just watch it on this binary funny or not funny, will find the show fascinating. And that is why I think the show can be successful in another country, because it's not something that necessarily just relates to the style of humor.

7:37That's a part of it. but I don't think it's the whole thing. As you say, SNL has been on in the States for 51 years. And the name that you mentioned right at the beginning of our chat, Lorne Michaels, has been associated with it for the duration. I'm just wondering, how central has he been to the success of SNL? And for SNL UK, don't we need a little bit of Lorne Michaels magic? I would think so. I mean, the show does not exist now without him. Last year, we celebrated the 50th anniversary of the show. And it really was a celebration of Lorne, like all of his old friends coming back, people getting to talk about how great he was.

8:11He has an eye for talent that I think maybe nobody else does in our universe. He can find people and be like, this is going to be the next biggest star. I think he just did that right now with a woman named Ashley Padilla, who's on our cast in the US. And I think that he had, I assume, a little bit of a role in putting together what we have here in the UK in that cast. And when I spoke to James Longman, who I got the privilege of interviewing last week, he told me that Lauren's mentorship has become so important in the process of building up this show. I will also say, I think that there's an opportunity here for James Longman, who is younger than Lauren, to play around a little bit with the show.

8:55There's a huge question mark of, you know, in Saturday Night Live US, you know, what does the show look like in a post-Lauren world if he decides to retire. And I think that SNL US can look to SNL UK for some of the things that James Longman might do to tweak the show so that it continues to be popular for decades to come. Just to explain, James Longman is the show producer for SNL UK. He's the man in charge. Might be the only aspect of the special relationship that still exists right now, John, if that does take place. Look, it's been a pleasure chatting to you. Fingers crossed that The launch of SNL UK lives up to your expectations.

9:32John, thanks very much indeed. OK, so let's get a British perspective on the launch. I spoke to Rosie Holt. She's an actor, writer, comedian. She rose to prominence in the COVID years thanks to her sharp political satire and her viral social media sketches. Rosie, it is lovely to see you again. I need to ask you, with the arrival of Saturday Night Live here in the United Kingdom, what is the state of British comedy right now? I think the future of comedy is in a really interesting place. But I do think it's good in lots of ways. I think they're such amazing comedians and I think there are so many varied ways of getting seen and it's much more, I think, open in lots of ways than it used to be.

10:12I have these conversations with comedians where you're not quite sure what it's going to look like in ten years, say. The places in which you can seek an opportunity seem to have changed. There are more of them. But at the same time, I do wonder whether, you know, the arrival of the new show SNL UK, at the very least, provides an opportunity for some comedians who may not be quite as well-known as others to have a showcase. It used to be the way that you could go up to Edinburgh and have an incredibly hit show like The Mighty Boosh and then you would get a commission on TV and that doesn't really happen anymore.

10:51It's almost like the kind of sketches online and the internet has kind of sprung up in its place. Sketch comedy used to be such a staple in this country on TV and it's not anymore. And I think it's a great opportunity that we're going to have a sketch show again. For those who don't know Rosie Holt as well as Ali do, just explain your kind of path into comedy because I think actually it really does illustrate the point that you're making that actually for the old traditional ways, appear at the fringe, get a television slot, it's not happening in the same way. I mean, you came through social media incredibly quickly.

11:25Yeah, totally. So I trained as an actor and I was working as a kind of actor comedian. And then with, you know, with a modicum of success and then a lockdown hit. And like everyone, I was a bit feeling a bit spare. And I started uploading satirical videos where I usually pretend to be an MP and they went viral. And yes, it totally changed my career and it really gave it a kickstart. It was very strange. Also, it was very strange because it happened over the pandemic when there wasn't really any work being made. but it opened huge doors for me. Rosie, when it comes to the SNL format we often hear that an American sense of humour is very different to the one that we have in this country.

12:03I mean, first and foremost, do you actually think that's true? I think what will be really interesting about SNL UK is hopefully if they can kind of pull off retaining what is great about British humour I think they're really onto a winner because I think especially if you look at our sketch shows they're often a lot more darker and kind of subversive and less family friendly, even when they're in a kind of family friendly format. It definitely feels very American in lots of ways, especially kind of in the way they kind of play with the hosts and the sort of quite kind of bombastic nature of it, which I can't imagine working in the same way in the UK.

12:46So it'll be really interesting to see what they do with it. I have to admit, my eyes will immediately be on that part of the show they call the United States, the cold open, where essentially, you know, the television continuity announcer says, here's the programme and they start and they come straight in on a sketch. And it's usually political. Is there anything inherently dangerous about putting political satire live on TV? When you're doing anything political, I think there's always a fear to it because are people going to take it the right way? Are people going to be offended? Are people going to know what the target is?

13:18I think there's a lot more scrutiny and judgment on comedy than there ever was. In terms of the political landscape, I found under the Tories, it was actually very easy. Also, I felt everyone was so angry. A lot of people were so angry about how the Tory government were conducting themselves, and especially under lockdown and things like that. So it felt like there were really clear targets. Also, you had very big characters in the Tory cabinet, which were easy to parody and satirise. I think what has been difficult under Labour is people are reacting less with anger and more with despondency.

13:55And a lot of people are switching off. And Labour, I think, for a lot of people, have been a bit of a letdown. So it's how you chime to that public mood while also being sharp and insightful. One of the defining features of Saturday Night Live, to me at least, has always been its ensemble cast. An ensemble cast that has meant that women have always been very prominent in the SNL line-up, which is something I would gently suggest has not always been the case when it's come to British comedy on television. I was having this conversation the other day with someone. and they were asking about kind of comedy, female comedy heroes.

14:34And inevitably, you think of when you were growing up, I was thinking of people like Victoria Wood and French and Saunders. Although it's been tougher for women, it's definitely in sketch where women were kind of getting seen quite early on. So sketch, I think, has always been better in this country at welcoming in women than stand-up or other forms of comedy. I mean, I suppose in a roundabout way, I'm asking, you know, for comedians like yourself who came up through that social media route, whether television does still hold that same cachet? Oh, definitely. Also, I love TV. I watch so much of it.

15:13I watch loads of TV. It could be such an amazing opportunity for so many comedians. Looking at the performing team, the writing team, they've got a real mix of people who've been around for a while and people who are very new. but yes I mean I'm very thankful to all the social media and what it's brought me but yeah TV is great that's what I think Rosie always a pleasure to talk to you you look after yourself thanks again there's a certain confidence in backing something like SNL UK and saying that live comedy on TV still has a place in a world full of streaming and catch up and that's your lot for this week on This Is Why Best of luck to the SNL UK team.

15:57I will be tuning in. Sky 1, 10pm this Saturday, obviously. You can also watch on streaming service now or on catch up later. Don't forget, you can keep in touch with us here on the This Is Why team. The email address, why at sky.uk. We're back the other side of the weekend. Till then, take care.

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