Saturday Night Live UK series 2 premiere review: more hit than miss

I was properly into the first series of this, more than I expected to be going in. It was hit and miss early on, this cast and this writers' room still finding their feet, but it got noticeably better as it went, to the point where I stopped bothering with the American original most weekends. So series two returning this Saturday was one of the few appointment-viewing nights left on my calendar, and Jeff Goldblum hosting with CMAT on musical duties felt like a properly good way to kick it back off.

The cold open, and one line that didn't sit right

The cold open was fantastic, genuinely very funny. George Fouracres has retired his Keir Starmer impression for Andy Burnham. Paddy Young actually introduced the Burnham character last series, so I half expected him to keep playing it, and watching Fouracres take it over instead wrongfooted me a little, which did half the work of selling the joke on its own. The Harry and Meghan sketch, set at Balmoral with Jack Shep and Ayoade Bamgboye as the couple visiting Larry Dean's King Charles and Emma Sidi's Queen Camilla, was the other highlight. "Don't tell me you've spent all your Netflix money already," Charles asks, and Harry's comeback, "it was $60 million, how long was it meant to last," actually made me laugh out loud. The one bit that didn't work for me was a crack about the size of Andy Burnham's son, presumably meaning tall rather than anything else, but even landing on the right meaning it came across a bit needlessly mean for a joke about someone's kid.

Goldblum doing a Goldblum

The monologue is rarely my favourite part of any SNL, UK or US. It isn't why I tune in. Goldblum did something different with it at least, a Count Basie style jazz number sung rather than spoken, which was a decent enough novelty even if it still wasn't a highlight for me. He's clearly enjoying being here though, cracking up at his own bits along with the cast more than once, which is exactly the energy you want from a host by episode one of a run he's clearly going to be back for.

The sketches were where the episode actually earned its "more hit than miss." Goldblum played somebody's invisible friend, in a bit that turns out to be about how sad his life has become once that premise plays out, and it's genuinely funny. A sketch about an uncle feeding his nephew lines through an earpiece on a date, which then goes wrong when the phone gets stolen mid-date, had a great premise even if Goldblum looked a little lost about how to land a couple of the endings. Bi King Kong, a big-budget monster movie parody with a bisexual twist right there in the title, didn't do much for me until right at the very end, when it cut to an old-world cinema title card just reading the name, and for some reason that got a proper laugh out of me.

CMAT, and a Weekend Update that's finally clicking

CMAT's country-Irish set was good, genuinely good, just not the part of the night that's stuck with me most. Weekend Update was very funny too, helped by a news week that basically wrote itself: Nigel Farage, Donald Trump, the Dover protests, plenty to work with. What's actually noticeable now, two series in, is how much more comfortable Paddy Young and Ania Magliano are as a pairing. Their timing's better, they're calling back to each other's lines properly, and there's a real back-and-forth to it now instead of two people just taking turns at a desk.

More hit than miss, and a proper way to open a second series.

This was a good episode to come back on. Not a flawless one, the monologue still isn't for me and Bi King Kong overstayed its welcome, but the cold open and Weekend Update were both really good. Jamie Demetriou hosts next Saturday with Royal Blood on musical duties, and given how much I rate him as a comic actor, that's the next appointment already in the diary.