‘We’ve proved the haters wrong!’: how ‘Saturday Night Live UK’ came to life

Launching a UK franchise of a beloved and storied American institution requires a delicate balance of reverence for your forefathers with an unafraidness to branch out and create something uniquely British. It makes Rolling Stone UK and Saturday Night Live UK appropriate bedfellows.

While consistent comparisons and a uniquely British appetite to see something like this fail followed SNL UK around ahead of its launch last month, the first four weeks of the show have seen the reaction change to one of near-universal praise – some begrudging, most with a sigh of relief and a big belly laugh.

“I personally don’t think about that at all,” cast member Celeste Dring tells Rolling Stone UK of comparisons with their American cousins. She’s speaking on set at the famous old Television Centre in west London, the bustling new home of the show, just before a one-week break halfway through the first season run of eight episodes. “I just write what I think is funny.”

One of the keys to the early success of SNL UK has been a refusal to get drawn into this perceived pressure. Entering the world of the show at the start of a week where the jokes, props, sets and costumes for that Saturday’s show all don’t exist yet, the mood is one of serene calm punctured with excitement for what might unfold and come to be by the time the show goes live at the end of the week.

Across the show’s first four episodes – hosted by SNL alum Tina Fey, Jamie Dornan, Riz Ahmed and Jack Whitehall – a tone of political boldness, British sensibilities and an unafraidness to get truly weird have marked the show out. From Jack Shep’s instantly iconic Princess Diana sketch in episode one, to Shakespeare returning to Stratford-upon-Avon from London with “a cunty little earring” and the ruthless and hilarious pair of Ania Magliano and Paddy Young on the Weekend Update segment, the show has come out of the blocks flying.

“One thing we’ve done really well is prove the haters wrong,” Scottish comedian and cast member Larry Dean laughs, joking but not really. The haters, he says, “were cringing before we even started, and I think we’ve shown them…

“I was very quietly confident that the show was going to be great, because [in] the writers and performers, the standard is really high,” Dean adds. “We’re always trying to make sure that we’re doing something a bit different and that’s ballsy. British humour is a bit ballsy.”

Dring and Dean are joined in the cast by a fresh and exciting batch of new British comedians from all different disciplines. Magliano has made her name on the standup stage as well as on Taskmaster, while Al Nash skewers hipster London culture in bitingly funny Instagram sketches. Shep, looking already like the breakout star of the show, got his start on TikTok, while Ayoade Bamgboye won the Edinburgh Comedy Award for Best Newcomer in 2025.

With both new and established names also in the 20-strong writing team – from stalwart Humphrey Ker to superb new French standup Celya AB – SNL UK’s strength comes from its swerving of the elder generation of household name comedians that made their name on the circuit of now-shrinking TV panel shows.

“Like many industries it’s hard in comedy right now,” Joe Lycett wrote on Instagram before the show launched. “When I started there were a bunch of panel shows and opportunities to get exposure on TV, but with budgets being squeezed all over the place it’s so much more complicated to get a break for newer talent these days.”

“I’ve got no skin in the game for the show but my love of live TV and British comedy, but I got such a jolt of excitement being there,” added Lycett, who had been filming a separate project at TV Centre and bumped into the cast. Harry Hill popped up in the comments, writing: “We need this to work !!!”

For Nish Kumar, another panel show favourite, his hope (shared on his podcast) was that the show “will be gutsy and do interesting political things”. Kumar was the former host of The Mash Report, which was allegedly taken off the air by the BBC in 2021 due to its perceived left-wing bias, before returning on Dave for a short time.

Indeed, SNL UK hasn’t pulled any punches in its early weeks. While jibes at Trump and Keir Starmer feel predictable, far bolder was Young’s segment on Weekend Update at Easter, which he described as “the time of year where we celebrate the only murdered Palestinian we’re allowed to talk about”.

“It’s nice to have that support and goodwill, and it means more coming from people within the industry,” Dring says, “because they know how hard it is to get stuff off the ground and to make stuff. To even be in this industry, you have to have a healthy dose of delusion.

“These people are very experienced and understand where the industry is at,” she adds. “Opportunities like this, particularly in the last ten years in the UK, have really died off. Big ensemble sketch shows are not a thing anymore, and they haven’t been for a long time. Big writers’ rooms, general risk taking and huge creative teams haven’t been a thing for a long time. The older generation understood that they had more of those opportunities and are sympathetic to us struggling more to find our way.”

Witnessing the show live feels like a night out as much as attending a TV show taping. At the fourth episode of the series, Bamgboye and fellow cast member Annabel Marlow sing Amy Winehouse’s version of ‘Valerie’ to warm the crowd up before the live show begins, and everything is soundtracked by an excellent house band pieced together by the show’s Musical Director Pauli Lovejoy, aka Pauli the PSM.

With credits including bringing Harry Styles’ Love on Tour to life and work alongside Jamie xx, Robyn, Florence + the Machine and plenty more as a superb drummer, Lovejoy was brought in to compose and direct the live music that pulsates throughout the show’s sketches, recorded segments and more, giving it an unmistakable beating heart.

“What does Britishness look like to you?” Pauli was asked by Lead Producer James Longman when first coming on board for the show, he remembers. It’s an existential question at any time but feels particularly knotty in the current moment.

“I thought that was a really compelling question in this time, when I’m walking around and I’m seeing Union Jacks and St George’s crosses,” Lovejoy tells Rolling Stone UK. “The first thing for me was making sure that the band was representative of the people that are going to watch the show. I wanted to make sure we had all ages covered, all genders covered, all ethnicities.”

Keen to make the band unique and not “a rip-off of the American band,” Lovejoy’s first move was to bring in Nigel Hosten (aka Mr Dex) as DJ (“He comes from pirate radio and gets the culture more than anyone”). Joining him are bassist Arthur Franks, a notable name in the thriving Peckham jazz scene, vocalist Louise Labelle (who has sung with Jessie J, Joss Stone and more), Shakespeare Company drummer Fez Oguns and more.

“It’s a real mix and blend of musicians from different worlds, different cultures and different genres,” Lovejoy smiles. “I didn’t want any genre to feel untapped. There are moments [in the show] where we have to play something that’s Baroque, and then the next thing is a rock thing, and then it’s a radio station garage joint. There’s no genre that we can’t play – that’s our superpower as a house band.”

As well as performing live throughout the Saturday night show, music is also recorded for VT segments in the show across the week by Lovejoy and the band in a ramshackle studio in the TV Centre basement (“We call it Shabby Road!”). It ties in with the SNL tradition of the use of cue cards instead of autocue, giving the show a defiantly analogue feel that marks it out. “Just because it’s easy doesn’t make it better,” Lovejoy says of this approach.

“When you see those cue cards, you see how playful it is. That’s someone’s handwriting, it’s not Times New Roman. That in itself will give you a different feeling, and it’s those small percentages throughout every department that make a massive difference to the end result. The idea of being a purist isn’t something that is spoken about, but it is an unspoken intention.”

In contemplating the question of Britishness, Lovejoy eventually came back to himself and settled on a very simple answer: “I am Britishness. I think I’m the epitome of it.” With Windrush generation grandparents that settled in north London, he grew up in Edmonton. “I’d walk outside and hear bhangra music playing from my neighbours,” he says. “I’d go further down the street and hear cars blaring Turkish psychedelic funk and then I’d walk to the park and all these kids are banging the latest grime. That’s Britishness to me – it’s this melting pot that just works.”

Melting pot is an apt description of the show’s cast and its ever-developing humour, too. “They’ve done a great job with the cast in terms of celebrating all of that,” Lovejoy says. “Some of the names you read [in the cast], not everyone’s got generic ‘English’ names. That’s the beauty of who we are as a culture and as a society. I am the epitome of Britishness, and we all are – that’s the magic.”

‘Saturday Night Live UK’ continues on April 25 with host Nicola Coughlan and musical guests Foo Fighters.