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British comedy once dominated the small screen, spawning iconic shows and formats from “Monty Python” to “The Office.” But the last decade hasn’t been a bundle of laughs as sketch shows and sitcoms fell out of fashion,
partly due to traditional broadcasters’ shrinking budgets while awards-hungry streamers were focused on prestige dramas that grabbed headlines and travelled internationally – something comedies struggle with.
Over the past year, however, there has been a shift, with commissioners taking big swings on shows like Sky’s “Saturday Night Live U.K.,” TLC’s “Mock the Week” – both of which return for a second season this weekend — and “L.O.L: Last One Laughing U.K.” on Prime Video, which drops a Halloween special next month followed by a third season in 2027. So busy is the landscape that Variety hears shows are even competing over studio space.
“I definitely do [think comedy commissioning is bouncing back],” says “Mock the Week” host Dara Ó Briain. “‘L.O.L,’ ‘SNL [U.K.]’ and us are being used to push channels, which is the first time that’s happened in a while.”
In particular, “SNL U.K.” has injected some pizzazz into British TV comedy since its March debut, partly thanks to its cast of mostly fresh faces. Three comedians Variety spoke to for this piece, two of whom auditioned for the show, all said they’d expected “SNL U.K.” to feature the “usual suspects,” meaning British panel show regulars such as Romesh Ranganathan, Rob Beckett and Katherine Ryan. “I think it’s really exciting and brave of them to take those risks and cast new people because that should be what that show is for,” said one of the two who auditioned, agreeing to speak on condition of anonymity.
Still, the cast’s inexperience — coupled with plenty of good old British scepticism — added to the trepidation over the show’s potential. “Certainly [there was] a risk of ‘Oh this could be diabolically terrible on a very global stage’ and I think that was a concern,” said the comedian. “I was always quite enticed by that risk because I thought if it all went terribly and blew up it would be quite a good story to be part of the first — and only — cast of ‘SNL U.K.’”
Castmember Jack Shep recently admitted the negativity in the lead-up to launch had been “deeply stressful.” (There are even rumors one up-and-coming comedian turned down a cast role after a bad experience on another pilot, saying they couldn’t risk a second public flop; Sky declined to comment).
As well as risking their nascent careers, “SNL” is notoriously labor-intensive, requiring six-day weeks for months at a time. (After Season 2 was confirmed for this fall, a number of castmembers including “Weekend Update” hosts Paddy Young and Ania Magliano, had to postpone solo tours.) “By comparison, “L.O.L,” is shot over the course of six hours (barring the confessionals) and “Mock the Week” is also a one-day-a-week commitment for its regulars, aside from a day or two’s worth of material prep.
The remuneration for “SNL U.K.” is decent – Variety understands the cast were initially offered around £40,000 to £50,000 ($54,000 to $67,000) each for Season 1 – but it’s a full-time commitment. “It’s so intensive, they own you for 12 weeks,” said the comedian who auditioned. “I would make more on my tour spanning the same length of time.”
(The original “SNL” also pays relatively little at least for newbies, with Pete Davidson saying he earned around $3000 per episode when he started in 2014. By contrast, Channel 4’s long-running comedy gameshow “Taskmaster,” which reportedly requires only a week’s filming, albeit spread out over a number of months, is said to pay £50,000 per season.)
The eleven cast members (upped to twelve for Season 2) represent just a fraction of the show’s total staffing costs, with around 300 people working each episode, including 20 writers, dozens of costume designers and make-up artists, an in-house band and even a team dedicated to writing and holding cue cards. (“The cue card team are amazing,” Liz Clare, the director, recently said during a panel at the Edinburgh TV Festival. “It’s a dark art.”) As Variety previously reported, the show’s budget is around £2 million per episode, roughly four times the cost of other flagship comedy shows, representing a huge investment for Sky. (Two sources tell Variety that long-running sports panel show “A League of Their Own” was cut in part to fund “SNL U.K.” Sky declined to comment.)
The key question, of course, is whether that investment has paid off. In terms of ratings, the answer is “kind of.” The show’s premiere, hosted by “SNL” alum Tina Fey, garnered 226,000 viewers, the most-watched episode of the season. Ratings steadily declined until the mid-season hiatus, after which they increased each week, peaking with Hannah Waddingham at 197,200 before hitting a series low for the season finale which was hosted by Ncuti Gatwa and garnered 86,420 viewers. (The last episode went head-to-head with the Eurovision Song Contest grand final on the BBC, which scored an average of 5.2 million viewers.)
By contrast, “Mock the Week,” which also aired eight episodes (plus an end-of-season special) this past spring, saw a peak of 337,000 viewers for episode 5 while its lowest-watched episode was episode 3, with 223,000 viewers. It’s season finale, airing the day after “SNL U.K.” launched, scored an average of 328,000. Meanwhile “The Graham Norton Show” (although not strictly comedy, it’s stars’ number one choice when they’re in town to promote a project) consistently gets over a million views each week in its Friday night slot on BBC One. Last season the opening episode got 1,300,660 and the last episode got 1,155,270.
There are caveats. Firstly, Sky One is only available to subscribers, while both the BBC and Warner Bros. Discovery-owned TLC, which broadcasts “Mock the Week,” are free-to-air (albeit TLC only became free-to-air in February and is much harder to find than Sky One). Secondly, despite the relatively low ratings “SNL U.K.” has still been getting around six times as many viewers as the movies Sky One broadcasts in the same slot when the show is off air (this past Saturday they played Tom Hardy-starrer “Venom” in the 9.30pm to 11.10pm, averaging just 32,500 viewers).
Then, of course, there’s consolidated seven-day ratings, which show rosier numbers (the Tina Fey episode jumped from 226,000 to 528,000 when consolidated and tripled to 784,000 when factoring in repeats) although as one veteran entertainment commissioner told Variety, “What you should really be looking at is your live ratings, otherwise why are you doing it live?”
“SNL U.K.’s” live element is of course one of the most expensive aspects of the show. As well as renting out a studio on a standing basis for the season’s run (Variety understands Season 2 will again take over the 10,800-square foot TC1 at Television Centre in White City, although it’s unclear what will happen when longstanding tenant “The Graham Norton Show” returns at the end of the month) the cast and crew also do a full dress rehearsal in front of a live audience on Saturday morning, effectively doubling their workload. “It would be a hell of a lot cheaper not to do it live,” says the veteran commissioner. But as the comedian who applied for the show points out, it’s the live element – the fact that it can all go wrong on national TV – “that makes ‘SNL’ exciting.”
It has also made the show’s live broadcast – plus the afterparty — one of the hottest tickets in town. Every Saturday night during “SNL U.K.’s” run last season the lawn outside Television Centre was awash with hip twenty and thirty-somethings more typically seen in Hoxton. And, like it’s New York counterpart, “SNL U.K.” has become a de facto hang-out for celebs. Last season J.J. Abrams, Russell T. Davies and Edgar Wright were among the familiar faces who stopped by to catch a broadcast just for the fun of it.
It’s why for Sky, “SNL U.K.” is about much more than just ratings. The show premiered just five days before HBO Max launched in the U.K.: the steamer’s arrival across the pond representing the final nail in the coffin of Sky and Warner Bros. Discovery’s long-running output deal, which had enabled Sky to tempt British subscribers with exclusive premium U.S. content like “Euphoria” and “House of the Dragon.” Now that WBD/HBO is hoarding buzzy new shows like “The Pitt” and the upcoming “Harry Potter” series for its own platform, launching starry and storied American IP like “SNL” – which Sky supported with an unprecedented nationwide ad campaign that included full poster takeovers across four major U.K. cities — is a way to remind subscribers the U.K. network still has its finger on the pulse.
“They don’t care about viewing numbers,” one seasoned talent agent, who spoke on condition of anonymity, told Variety of Sky’s mindset. “It’s about ‘Do you know it’s on?’ and ‘Do you know it’s on Sky?’ and ‘Will it be something that gets people to subscribe?’”
It helps that any financial outlay on “SNL U.K.” effectively stays in-house given the show is licensed and produced by fellow Comcast stablemates including NBCUniversal and Universal Television Alternative Studio U.K. (Interestingly a number of the show’s guest hosts have also been part of the Universal family, including “SNL” alum Tina Fey, Jack Whitehall, who stars in Peacock and Sky’s “The Burbs” and Jeff Goldblum, who hosts the Season 2 premiere this week and has starred in a number of Universal Pictures blockbusters such as “Wicked” and “Jurassic World: Dominion”).
With public service broadcaster ITV also set to join the Comcast family, thanks to Sky’s impending acquisition (the deal is currently winding its way through the legal and regulatory process), there has been much chatter about exposing “SNL U.K.” to a bigger audience by transposing it onto the free-to-air network (Sky’s head of entertainment, Phil Edgar Jones, shot down those rumors in Edinburgh, saying “It’s very much a Sky show.”)
Either way, “SNL U.K.” has undeniably been a hit for Sky, garnering plenty of column inches and sprinkling some much-needed stardust on the network, especially after the departure of longtime content exec Zai Bennet in 2024.
While the show’s success – along with that of “Mock the Week” and “L.O.L.” among other comedy titles – has been welcomed by the industry (“A lot of people wanted ‘SNL U.K.’ to work,” says one competitor) it also highlights the plight of the country’s public service broadcasters, like BBC and Channel 4, who were the traditional incubators for homegrown comic talent. The former is responsible for launching iconic shows ranging from “Fawlty Towers” and “Blackadder” to “The Thick of It” and “Goodness Gracious Me” while the latter propelled “Da Ali G Show,” “Spaced,” “The Inbetweeners” and “Taskmaster” into public consciousness. Today, both PSBs are facing existential funding crises; just this week Channel 4 said it would be slashing 28% of its workforce. That in turn has meant less budget for comedy (to wit, the new “Inbetweeners” movie is set to land on Netflix).
Channel 4 commissioner Cimran Shah denies there’s been a “slow down” in greenlighting comedy, pointing to the network’s “long history of experimenting with new comics” – including launching a new comedy showcase in 2025 — but admits “we have had to respond to the market and the constraints that everyone has had to respond to.” (It is still acquiring shows, including recently Chris Evans’ “TFI Friday Unplugged,” a Virgin Radio U.K. YouTube show).
But shrinking budgets inevitably lead to taking fewer risks. “I think we are less brave with television comedy now than fifty years ago,” seasoned comedian Phil Simon says, pointing out that Rowan Atkinson’s historical comedy “Blackadder” was almost cancelled after the first season flopped on the BBC in 1983 before being given a second chance. Today it’s widely regarded as one of Britain’s best comedy series.
Even the shows currently making noise, while encouraging for comedians, don’t exactly represent fresh ideas. “SNL” is a 50-year-old title, “Mock the Week” first launched in 2005 on BBC Two, where it ran for 17 years (TLC revived the show in a longer format this year after a three-year hiatus) and “L.O.L.” is based on a 10-year old Japanese format that Prime Video has replicated across a number of markets. “It’s so hard to get things to work in this very crowded space,” says one veteran comedy producer. “If you’ve got a name [why not use it?]”
Comedians, meanwhile, are just happy to have more opportunities, even if they’re not exactly laughing all the way to the bank. “What people were saying in the comedy scene [when ‘SNL U.K.’ was announced] was ‘Ooh possibly some money,’” says another comedian who applied for the show and made it through to the final round of auditions. Anecdotally, comedians are hearing the show has potentially reignited commissioners’ appetite for sketch, which many thought was long dead. As for whether it’s contributing to a comedy comeback more generally, the jury is still out.
“I think ‘SNL [U.K.]’ has been part of a bigger cultural wave of comedy,” says the first comedian. “Comedy is having a real boom at the moment anyway with social media… there’s more comedians touring than there ever have been in the U.K.” They suggest that if anything, the last comedy to really move the needle was “Taskmaster,” created by Alex Horne, which debuted on Channel 4 back in 2015.
Regardless of who’s responsible, there is suddenly a sense that comedy is cool again. “I think the country culturally got tired of being hopeless,” Shah says. “We want to feel optimistic about something, we want to give something a go. Cynicism is easy. We would like to give this a chance.”
