‘How could this be anything other than funny?!’ Behind the scenes of Saturday Night Live UK

SNL is a US comedy institution – can a British version rise to the challenge of finding the funny in our comparatively beige politicians every week? We speak to the team hand-picked to do just that

It is the calm before the storm. The storm being the impending debut of Saturday Night Live UK, our very own version of the US’s headline-grabbing, agenda-setting, impossibly influential TV comedy institution. The calm is a group of performers and writers sitting round a table in a bare-walled boardroom in west London’s Television Centre, seemingly unperturbed by the gargantuan task of staging a live sketch show – most of which will be written in the week of broadcast – or the prospect of a scathing reaction to it. Can SNL UK breathe new life into our ailing comedy industry? Or will the format fail spectacularly on these shores? I come away convinced I’m more nervous about finding out than the cast and crew are about actually making it.

Perhaps they’re just having too much fun. For the past four weeks, 11 performers and 20 writers have been spending every weekday together in this very building, hashing out premises for skits, workshopping each other’s material and “finding the alchemy”, as cast member and standup Ayoade Bamgboye puts it. For another, actor and TikToker Jack Shep, it’s been like “comedy boarding school”.