Waddingham on SNL UK

Sketch comedy is hard.

Sure, anyone can do it - but not well.  Further, week in and week out, putting on a sketch show that actually lands most of the bits is a challenge.  It may be one of the oldest forms of television, but how many of these shows are well remembered?  How many jokes last the length of a sketch?

While Saturday Night Live has lasted 51 seasons, innumerable other shows have come and gone. 

I've aged out of watching the US version of SNL.  And that's fine.  I had a very good run of watching the show off and on.  And I'm glad the humor is pointing to a younger audience than me.  I am old.  I do not even know what SNL is talking about a good 1/5th of the time.  Thank god.

It never occurred to me that SNL was a franchisable concept, but I suppose so.  Why not?  American humor may not always translate, but the way the show works is a well-developed machine which you could plug in anywhere.  

Launched this year and on its 7th episode, apparently SNL has had a hard time getting a foothold in the UK with SNL-UK.  Ratings are, to put it bluntly, quite bad.  They started around 200K and dipped down to 130K or so.  

Now, that may not be a big deal.  People may be watching on YouTube or elsewhere.  I don't know how you count viewers in 2026.

Anyway, I didn't give the show's existence much thought.  I don't need something else to watch, and my Anglophilia is not that pronounced.  I only know the broadest bits about UK politics and who is who.  I don't get inside jokes about specific shoppes or whatever.  But I do like Hannah Waddingham, who hosted this week.

Tina Fey hosted the premiere, and in her monologue - the only bit I watched of the premiere of SNL-UK - no one is agreeing to host because of a very different sensibility of "what if this goes wrong?" versus the American notion of "well, they tried" and letting it go.  Apparently a bad outing would haunt the Brits more?  I don't know if this is true or not.  But I understand fear of exposure in a country that loves tabloid coverage.

However - nothing I've ever seen about Waddingham has led me to believe she's a particularly reserved person.  And, so, on May 9th, she hosted.  We watched the next day on Peacock here in the US.

For good or ill, Waddingham seemed an absolute natural in this environment and had a better understanding of what works here than the actual writers and cast-mates.  Where in the US hosts are often given the straight-man bit to do, reading off cue cards while the players do goofy stuff around them, Waddingham leaned into every bit as the featured player and seemed the polished one versus the cast mates who seem like what they likely are - comedians who are trying on some comedic acting.  

I guess decades of stage and screen experience will do that.  And a sense of the profoundly silly.

She had sketches as a driving instructor (she seemed to get the bit better than the cast), as a high school drama instructor, as Christine from Phantom who has settled down into the suburbs and forgotten her past.  She had a pretty good bit of singing in a sketch about where one is depending on how many glasses of wine they've had (kudos to the cast member doing her best to keep up with Sarah Sherman).  Not all of the sketches landed, but Waddingham was solid.  

The one dud was "Sunburnt Lawyers" that was both pre-taped and a 10 second joke stretched out to two minutes and was the fault of the writers for thinking this was ever a good idea.

She was not in the political cold open that went a bit over my head but I got mostly.  And she wasn't in the Weekend Update segment that was a reminder that BBC's late night standards are different, and the Brits have no problem saying the quiet part out loud.  As with modern SNL, it was the part worth watching.  Even if the pro-wrestling bit seemed like something we would have cooked up for a school video project in 8th grade.

This show is not for me, and that's fine.  Great, even.  I hope it succeeds and all those players become huge stars.  They need time to find their vibe.  And Lord knows SNL is constantly working to refind its vibe.  

But this episode felt more like "what if Hannah Waddingham were Carol Burnett?" for most of her sketches.  And that is the highest compliment I can really give when it comes to this form of entertainment.  Hopefully they'll have her back when the show finds its footing a bit better.