Tomorrow, live from London, it will be Saturday night.
The UK version of the NBC format that has come to define late night television across five decades is about to launch. Saturday Night Live UK has been nearly five years in the making (we first broke the news at Christmas 2021) and its inception can be traced back to the Polo Lounge at the Beverly Hills Hotel, where a nervous James Longman sat down with the iconic Lorne Michaels.
“I was texting my mate asking what I should wear and in the end I went for a crisp white shirt,” says Longman, lead producer of SNL UK. “I remember talking to Lorne for an hour about L.A. traffic over a cup of tea. I went away thinking, ‘Well if nothing ever happens, at least I’ve had that moment’. The only feedback I got was that he liked my crisp white shirt because no one in L.A. dresses smartly.”
Knowing his time exec-ing The Late Late Show with James Corden was nearly up, Longman had in fact been summoned by Michaels to the meeting to sound him out about overseeing a British version of SNL. Fast forward two years and he had landed a dream gig. Fast forward another two and he speaks with Deadline alongside his head writer and lead director about prepping for a career-defining few weeks.
“There’s nothing like Saturday Night Live,” he says. “It’s one in a million, particularly now when [getting] TV [made] is hard. This is the perfect opportunity to get voices out on TV and give all these frustrated people who haven’t had a chance for such a long time to have their moment. We are so excited to be here.”
Featuring a cast of mainly up-and-comers, SNL UK is Sky’s most expensive unscripted show of all time. Guest hosted by SNL stalwart Tina Fey, it will launch tomorrow night at 10 p.m. GMT (and the day after on Peacock), kicking off with a short, eight-episode run (extended from six this morning) that may have raised a few industry eyebrows given that the American version comes in blocks of around 20. SNL has been remade in numerous territories but the UK, with its world-renowned comedy legacy, was always the big one. Michaels, who is an EP and whose Broadway Video is co-producing, has been heavily involved throughout.
“Every emotion I’ve gone through it feels like he’s literally been there 1,000 times,” says Longman. “It’s so reassuring to have been able to lean on him. Who better in the world is there?”
For director Liz Clare, who has previously overseen big events like the BAFTA Film Awards, SNL UK gifts an opportunity to “maximize the live-ness of it all” and give British audiences a window into a new type of show.
“We are trying to give the people who have never engaged with the show an understanding of how it’s made,” she adds. “People are literally changing costumes in two minutes, sets are being wheeled out and others wheeled in, and it makes such a joyful experience. While it still runs on U.S. lines, this is a new space, it’s our space and it’s different.”
Clare “feels as though I’ve been at SNL school for the past 18 months” and has spent time in L.A. learning from the best. She and lead writer Daran Jonno Johnson are part of a crack team assembled by Longman, Michaels and the execs at Sky and Universal Television Alternative Studio that have been preparing for this moment for the past 18 months.
“A bit like speed dating”
The comedy community spent weeks abuzz with the question of who would comprise the first tranche of 11 comedians making up the SNL UK lineup. Johnson, meanwhile, was tasked with assembling a writers’ room of the best comic scribes in the British biz.
What followed was back-to-back rehearsals, as writers and cast honed technique and learned the ways of SNL.
“It’s been a little bit like speed dating,” says Longman. “We gelled as quickly as we could have with a relatively big group of unknowns to each other. When we did our first read through I was like, ‘OK these people are funny, it’s been written well and they are performing it.’ That was such a sense of relief because it wasn’t just me waking up in the night panicked. The chemistry was there.”
SNL UK casting has been the biggest British comedy talking point of the past year. Longman, production exec Suzy Aplin and their team sifted through 1,800 audition tapes before whittling things down. After tapes, there were showcases, attended by Michaels, and then the notorious empty studio performance, when comedians have to entertain the team for five minutes in the bare room. Famous examples such as Will Ferrell’s are a fun YouTube watch. “It’s a brutal process. I would find it impossible,” says Longman.
The team was always clear that the cast needed to be mostly up-and-coming talent, many of whom have been plucked from the growing world of social media comedy. The likes of Starstruck star Emma Sidi and Black Ops lead Hammed Animashaun are well known but newer faces include social media breakouts like Al Nash, stand-up circuit talents including Ania Magliano and Shakespearean theater actors such as George Fouracres.
Longman lights up when noting that he feels the final 11 are “more than the sum of their parts.”
“Hammed has done loads of acting, Emma is one of the best out there from the improv sketch world and George has done loads of theater,” says Longman. “I could go one by one. All of them add a different flavor and a different skill set. We’re trying to build something with people you want to spend time with. Hopefully you watch them and go, ‘I like these guys’.”
To generate that feeling, SNL UK needed good writers and an entrenched writing process.
Johnson, who is a member of the iconic Sheeps comedy sketch group trio, was tasked with overseeing the writers’ room, a rarity in a UK comedy landscape that tends to lean towards solo authored voices.
Featuring the likes of Johnson’s Sheeps comedy partner Al Roberts (husband to SNL UK cast member Sidi), Gráinne Maguire and James Farmer, Johnson says it is “sort of weird how close all the writers have come to each other.” “There are two writers who I assumed must have known each other for years because they always arrive together and go home together and it turns out they met on the first day,” he adds. “The cool thing about the writers’ room is that there are people who have been doing sketch a long time and there are people whose only sketch experience is literally the three sketches they submitted to the interview.”
That more relaxed culture sums up Johnson’s approach, which has seen him eschew the stereotyped SNL rooms of yesteryear in which writers were often said to stay up all night working on sketches only to see them torn up when the news agenda shifted.
“We’re optimstically approaching it to try and keep that to a minumum,” he says. “There’s a lot of show ahead and it may comes to that at some point but while this may have the SNL tradition and format, it’s also a new show. So we have the chance to set up these new habits.”
At this point, Longman chimes in and jokes: “Check in on this at 6 a.m. next Thursday.”
Plenty of material to draw from
SNL’s topicality means it is hard for Johnson’s team to prepare much beyond “some games that might be repurposed down the line,” but the team has nonetheless spent the past months treating each week as if it were an SNL launch week in order to hone their craft, with a little help from Michaels.
The news is a tough watch at the moment, with conflict around the world generating headlines, and Johnson knows this means the team will need to tread carefully.
“People from my life keep saying, ‘Oh you’ve got to do something with that’ and I find myself thinking, ‘What? That’s a really sad story!’,” says Johnson.
Keir Starmer, the technocratic and frankly rather dull UK Prime Minister, may not have quite the same SNL mockery appeal as Donald Trump, but Johnson is fortunate to have two corridors of power to play with for material, one of which has been in the news of late due to the behavior of a certain former Prince Andrew. “I guess we have two equivalents of the White House,” says Johnson. “We have Buckingham Palace and we have [the Prime Minister’s residence] 10 Downing Street and as a result there is this overlapping group of characters. I think we’ll find some good angles on that.”
Whatever is happening in the news during any given week, Johnson’s “north star” is posing the question: “Does it make us giggle?”. “It’s really hard to disagree with something you just laughed at,” he says.
“The most British thing I’ve ever seen”
SNL UK has its naysayers, with skeptics noting that British comedy sensibilities can often feel a fair distance from the U.S., while the American tradition of late night talkshows has never quite caught fire in the UK in the same way. They therefore wonder if the Sky version will find a devoted audience, especially if it tries too hard to echo the U.S. original.
“I don’t think any of the sketches we’ve been kicking around would find a natural home [on SNL US],” says Johnson. “None of us set off saying that we had to do British comedy with a British sensibility and then we did the first table read and I was like, ‘This is the most British thing I’ve ever seen’.”
That natural Britishness is exciting Longman even as the nerves jangle during last minute prep for tomorrow night. His career on both sides of the pond has seen him move from cult shows like Never Mind the Buzzcocks to big-budget American staples like The Late Late Show, “thrust into a world with the Tom Cruises, Matt Damons and Oprah Winfreys.”
“Being able to ‘talk American’ and ‘talk British’ helped translate this show,” says Longman. “It’s a lot scrappier over here but we are a country that punches up. I remember watching the 2012 Olympic opening ceremony and thinking, ‘God we’ve done a lot haven’t we? And we’re so small’. So the attitude we’re taking is that we are building something that we hope will run and be special, and at its heart will be funny.”
Longman is hopeful his most daring live comedy adventure yet will run far beyond that initial eight-episode order. Crisp white shirt at the ready, he is seeking an SNL UK legacy.
English (US) ·