Is this really the best moment to fulfil the long-cherished dream of an official British version of Saturday Night Live, half a century on from its stateside creation?
As anyone who’s ever encountered the pungent smell from a pint of milk that’s gone off, sell-by dates are there for a very good reason.
That applies to cultural phenomena every bit as much as supermarket products.
Take, for example, the Beatles, their legacy cemented and protected by their breakup, while the Rolling Stones trundle on and defy science but have fallen far from the pedestal that once placed them alongside their old rivals by virtue of their refusal to fade away.
Timing, of course, is everything in comedy too, especially when it comes to knowing that’s enough.
Saturday Night Live was the hottest thing on the planet when it emerged in the mid-Seventies, with a seemingly unending conveyor belt of sensationally gifted talent for a few years, John Belushi, Chevy Chase, Bill Murray and Dan Aykroyd quickly becoming household names and then big-screen Hollywood stars.
Driving the show behind the scenes was the iron will and vision of a former bar mitzvah boy known as Lorne Lipowitz, reborn as Lorne Michaels.
Even in the very beginning, SNL was a very hit and miss affair – that’s the inevitable price of being a live show and writing a whole bunch of topical material from scratch every week – but by the early 80s it had decidedly gone off the boil, was no longer essential viewing and the conveyor belt of stars was splutteringly stop-start – albeit producing Eddie Muphy – even if it hadn’t entirely ground to halt.
Over on the other side of the Atlantic, though, that didn’t stop comedians and television executives fondly imagining a lucrative SNL all of their own.
Channel 4 freely ripped the format in the mid-80s with Saturday Live (later Friday Night Live) which kicked-started the career of Harry Enfield (‘Loadsamoney!’) and motormouth comedian Ben Elton before they moved on to the BBC.
Forty years on, SNL in the US has occasionally sparked back to life but recently has been about as topical as a cuneiform tablet. (Their latest innovation is to get today’s line-up of stars delving through the archives to find the funniest treasured past moments. Says it all really.)
Cue the credits for the first episode of SNL UK at 10pm on Saturday night. And oy, what credits – a long, long succession of new names and faces being sold us as new stars we’re just bound to love.
To begin, a skit on Keir Starmer – note, vague attempts at nasal noises do not an impersonation make – and David Lammy (the very promising Hammed Animashaun) pondering how best to deal with Donald Trump. Woefully obvious and heavy-handed, even it did tickle someone’s funny bone – the president retweeted the sketch the next day.
Trying to bludgeon us into submission, the producers hurled A-list comedy guests stars into the mix – the incomparable Tina Fey the host, Graham Norton stepping in too to add the reassuring presence of mainstream British TV entertainment’s most dependable performer.
All of which only more starkly highlighted the failings of what followed – witheringly laughless skits and even jokes which showed some thin promise beaten so far to death it might be a matter for the international court in the Hague.
As to the quality of the performers, it’s hard to judge when the material’s this bad.
In a quite possibly apocryphal story from the early days of SNL, when the show was a hothouse of brilliance and fiercely competing egos, one day two of the stars got into a fight, until it was stopped by the devastating line Bill Murray hurled at Chevy Chase, pointing his finger and exclaiming the precisely measured put-down: “Medium talent!”
Would that any of the SNL UK crew eventually show themselves to be worthy of such an insult.
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