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.
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. Still, the cast’s inexperience — coupled with plenty of good old British scepticism — added to the trepidation over the show’s potential. 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. 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. 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. 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 relative
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