SNL UK Series 2 Review: Jeff Goldblum Was the Wrong Host, and 105,000 Is the Wrong Number to Judge It By

Somewhere around 105,000 people watched Jeff Goldblum open the second series of Saturday Night Live UK live on Saturday night. That’s the unofficial overnight figure doing the rounds, and it’s less than half the 226,000 who tuned in for Tina Fey back in March. If you only read the ratings columns, this SNL UK series 2 review writes itself: expensive American import, Sky One, nobody watching, quietly cancelled by Christmas.

Except that’s not what’s happening. And the number everyone’s quoting is the least useful one in the building.

I watched the Goldblum episode live, then again on NOW on Sunday morning with a coffee and a notepad, and the verdict is this: it was a patchy hour with a miscast host, two of the best minutes of live British comedy this year, and a Weekend Update that has properly found its feet. That’s not a doomed show. That’s an SNL episode. The American one has looked exactly like this for fifty years.

What the 105,000 figure gets wrong about SNL UK series 2

Start with the money. Variety put the budget at around £2 million an episode, which for a live sketch show in a rented BBC studio is enormous. Twelve episodes this series. You don’t spend that to win a 10pm Saturday slot on Sky One, a channel that hadn’t existed for five years before Sky revived it for this show.

You spend it for what happened after the first series went off air. Deadline’s analysis in April had SNL UK clips past 86 million views across its official social accounts at a point when the linear audience had dropped by a third. Broadcast’s consolidated numbers told the same story from the other side: the launch’s 226,000 overnight had more than doubled to 528,000 within seven days, and Sky’s own preferred measure (repeats and “other viewing” folded in) had it at 784,000. The run averaged 154,000 live, against a timeslot that had previously averaged 28,000.

So the show is being judged on the one number Sky cares least about.

The more interesting figure is who was watching. Broadcast reported the audience skewed heavily ABC1, and that viewing among younger people rose steadily through series one even as the headline number sagged. That’s the profile of a show being discovered on a phone at 11pm on a Tuesday, not one being appointment-viewed by families on a Saturday. The Independent’s Nick Hilton clocked this too, noting that the show “will live or die on its virality”. He meant it as a warning. I’d call it the business plan.

And there’s a small but telling detail buried in the ratings reports: NOW viewing of series one was too low to register in the online reports at all. Which means the streaming numbers everybody assumes are propping the show up are either invisible or tiny. The whole thing rests on YouTube and TikTok. Sky knows that. It’s why the eBay sponsorship runs a YouTube styling series rather than a TV ad.

Goldblum was the wrong host, and it wasn’t close

Here’s where I’ll disagree with most of the coverage, which treated Goldblum’s booking as the one bit of good news. The logic goes: Tina Fey opened series one, then the A-listers dried up, and landing a proper Hollywood name for the return proves the show still has pull.

It doesn’t help if the Hollywood name can’t do sketch comedy.

Goldblum did what Goldblum does, which is play Goldblum. The piano monologue was charming for about ninety seconds. He then turned up in sketch after sketch delivering every line in the same breathy, distracted register, and you could see the cast working twice as hard to fill the gap. The Telegraph’s Michael Hogan went further than I would, writing that Goldblum had “drained the humour” from his sketches, but the point stands. Emma Sidi, whom Hogan credited with saving several flagging sketches through force of personality, was the actual lead of the episode. She just wasn’t billed as it.

Compare the two guests. CMAT did “Stay for Something” and “Euro-Country”, turned up in the monologue, then dropped into the 45 Seconds with Fouracres bit and was funnier in it than the host had been all night. She’s a musician. That tells you something about what this show needs from the people it books.

Which is why I think the next two weeks are the show’s best shot, not evidence of a struggle. Jamie Demetriou (19 September, with Royal Blood) has been a consultant on the show since episode two and was involved in casting. Amelia Dimoldenberg (26 September, with Rachel Chinouriri) built a career out of ninety-second interviews that go viral. Hilton read those bookings as the producers failing to land Hollywood stars. But a Demetriou episode will almost certainly be funnier than a Goldblum one, and the clips will travel further. SNL UK doesn’t need household names. It needs hosts who understand that they’re the straight man.

The cast is now the reason to watch

This is the bit that’s changed since March. Series one spent a lot of its energy proving it could get through a live show without falling over, and the Guardian’s Lucy Mangan summed up the launch with the faintly damning “it didn’t fail and it could have been a lot worse”. Fair enough, at the time.

Six months on, the eleven returning cast members look like people who’ve done this before. George Fouracres opened as Andy Burnham where he’d opened series one as Keir Starmer, and the “I’m nothing like the last one!” wink was the sort of joke you can only make once a show has a memory. Jack Shep’s Princess Diana won TV Moment of the Year at the Edinburgh TV Festival in August, and the show took Best Comedy there too. It’s on the NTA longlist as well. Nobody was giving out awards to a doomed programme.

Weekend Update is the clearest improvement. Ania Magliano and Paddy Young were tentative in March, reading the cards rather than landing the jokes. On Saturday the material was sharper than anything on the American version’s Update this year, and the delivery, while still a bit stumbling, had actual rhythm. Magliano’s line on the AfD being “more of an old classic for Germany” was the best gag of the night. Young should be in more of the main sketches. He’s got a face built for playing the only sane man in the room.

Larry Dean’s King Charles complaining that Harry and Meghan had “spent all your Netflix money” was the clip that went round on Sunday, and it’s a decent example of the show’s sweet spot: royal, slightly cruel, over in forty seconds, and completely incomprehensible to an American audience. That last part matters. The American SNL has had a British sketch show’s worth of Royal Family impressions over the decades, and none of them have ever been funny, because the writers don’t have the resentment. This lot do.

Freddie Meredith, the only new addition, got one sketch being fed chat-up lines by Goldblum. Passable. He’ll get better material once the writers work out what he’s for.

Where it’s still falling down

The baby-thespian sketch (Fouracres as Gregor J Dupont, dressing as an infant to prepare expectant parents) had a good idea inside it and then borrowed its entire delivery from Peter Serafinowicz’s Brian Butterfield. Hilton spotted the lift and so did half of comedy Twitter. When you’ve got twenty writers and 30 to 35 sketches in development every week, with only eight making the cut, there’s no excuse for one of the eight being a tribute act.

The bigger structural problem is screen time. Hammed Animashaun and Ayoade Bamgboye barely appeared. In a cast of twelve that will even out, but it’s a pattern from series one: the same four or five faces carry every episode and the rest wait their turn. The American show has the same disease. There was a chance to fix it here and they haven’t.

And the show still doesn’t quite know how long it is. A full-length live show at 10pm on a Saturday is a big ask when the cold open runs five minutes and the last two sketches are, by tradition, the ones that only just made the cut. The best British sketch shows (Big Train, The Fast Show, Limmy) ran at thirty minutes and cut ruthlessly. SNL UK can’t do that because the format won’t let it, which is the price of the licence. But on the nights when the host isn’t carrying it, you feel every one of those minutes.

The £7.99 question

Practicalities, since the show’s on a channel most people don’t get. SNL UK goes out live on Sky One at 10pm on Saturdays, with the episode on NOW immediately afterwards and on Sky’s catch-up the next day. If you don’t have Sky, a NOW Entertainment membership is £7.99 a month on a rolling contract, or £4.99 a month if you sign up for six months. The Entertainment and HBO Max bundle is £9.99. If you’re already rotating your streaming subscriptions month by month, this is the obvious one to switch on for October.

Six episodes run through to 24 October, with a break until the remaining six air in January and February 2027. So a rolling NOW sub covers the whole autumn run for about £16, which is less than a single ticket to one of this year’s Edinburgh Comedy Award shows.

Or you can do what a large chunk of the actual audience does and wait for the clips on YouTube, which is free and takes eight minutes. I’d argue that’s missing the point, but I’d have said the same about people who only watch Match of the Day highlights, and I’m not sure I was right about that either.

The live show is a different thing from the clips. Sketches die on their feet in real time. The audience laughs at the wrong moment. Somebody corpses. That’s the whole appeal of the format, and it’s the thing British TV has spent twenty years engineering out of comedy in favour of panel shows recorded on a Tuesday and cut down to the safe bits. If you’ve ever moaned that Have I Got News for You is too polished now, this is the fix, and it’s on for a fiver. It’s also the only thing on Sky this autumn I’d put ahead of the safer bets on the BBC.

Why a British SNL matters more than whether it’s funny this week

The real case for SNL UK isn’t any individual episode. It’s what it does to the pipeline.

British comedy has had two routes to television for a generation: the Edinburgh Fringe, where a good hour might get you a Radio 4 series in three years’ time, or a panel show seat, where you say four prepared lines and the edit decides whether you’re funny. Neither builds performers. Neither teaches anyone to write to a deadline. We’ve been complaining about the lack of new sketch talent since The Mighty Boosh ended, and the honest answer is that nobody’s been paying for it.

Now somebody is. Twenty writers on staff, a cast of twelve on a full-series contract, a weekly deadline, and a test audience that tells you the same night whether the joke works. Chortle’s Steve Bennett made this argument back in May, and he was right: the show is worth more as an institution than as a programme. Steve Coogan, Chris Morris and Armando Iannucci all came out of a version of this machine at Radio 4 in the early nineties. Nothing like it has existed on television since.

Whether it survives long enough to matter is the question. Sky renewed it for twelve episodes on the strength of a series that averaged 154,000 live viewers. Comcast owns both Sky and NBC, so there’s a corporate reason for patience that wouldn’t exist at ITV. And the show has now split its series into two halves, which is either a sign of confidence (the American model, with breaks) or a hedge (cancel after six if the autumn goes badly). I’d guess the former, though I wouldn’t bet much on it.

What I’d bet on is this: if the Demetriou and Dimoldenberg episodes are as good as the cast currently is, the overnights will still be poor and the clips will do numbers that make the overnights irrelevant. That’s the show now. Judge it on what it is.

Would you sit through ninety minutes live on a Saturday for the two sketches that work, or is the YouTube edit the only version of SNL UK that makes sense to you?