The UK’s edition of Saturday Night Live, the USA’s long-running late-night sketch show, premiered last Saturday with a cavalcade of British cliches of a piece with the tea-drinking, queue-loving, conversation-avoiding reputation we’ve garnered over the years. We should’ve known it was headed this way with the first promo clip Sky posted to social media, which saw host Tina Fey dressed as Mary Poppins, descending from the studio ceiling to offer the cast some help in putting the show together. Crumpets, anyone?
As someone without Sky TV, or the temerity to use an illegal pirating service, I’ve resorted to consuming last week’s show through the clips posted to YouTube. And, despite various dissatisfied, yet not outraged reviews, I quite liked it; an enjoyable enough impression of Keir Starmer, a much-commented-upon Princess Diana impression. It was at least funny enough to watch hungover.
But throughout the show, a performed Britishness persists, that feels greatly like a greatest hits album of a band who disbanded fifty years ago. Keir Starmer’s send-up cast him as some cowering subordinate to the US President, frightened of confrontation, while a Paddington sketch also got a look-in. And that Diana impression featured in a bloated sketch including Sir David Attenborough, Winston Churchill, and Sir Isaac Newton among others, brought together to discuss what makes Britain great.
What necessitates this signalling of our national identity through a coterie of romanticised icons? Comedian Stewart Lee contends that the show seems to be banking on being watched over the Atlantic, and making enough money there to justify its existence. It certainly seems as though we’re pitching a parody of ourselves and courting overseas viewership. I mean, how famous here is Tina Fey?
But beyond that, SNL UK accidentally recognises the present state of Britishness. National identity is a foggy idea at the best of times, but at this point British identity is so nebulous as to be indecipherable. We saw this with the should-they-shouldn’t-they flag-flying bonanza last summer; the principal conclusion from a weeks-long debate as to what our national flag represented was that it meant so little that people could feasibly claim it meant anything. Some cultures, most obviously America’s, centre their identity around an idea – in the USA’s case, the optimism of the American dream (hollow as it increasingly is). So what’s our idea? Cynicism? If that’s the case, the pessimistic attitude with which SNL UK’s announcement was treated feels far more British than anything seen in its debut. Britishness still exists in the minutiae of the nation – the pub gardens, the snide politeness. But you can’t have a national conversation around the prices at Wetherspoons, and sentiments of that ilk constitute the bulk of our national character.
So SNL UK presents Britishness as a succession of figures for whom the public have a penchant, not a nationality based on a sensibility or a set of values, with which it should be concerned. British identity, then, is intangible, remote; it’s not a culture, it’s a personality, and a distant one at that.
‘Two world wars and one world cup’ is perhaps the crystallisation of the traditional English, if not British, sense of national identity, and it’s a dead fantasy of a better past – that in many cases wasn’t that great after all, and at any rate is non-existent. For many, the present is unrelentingly bleak, and the future is yet to be built. But instead of renovating ideas for the future, the cultural movements of the day fetishise a perceived former glory, call it patriotism, and leave the culture malnourished and hollow. Fly a flag from a lamppost; the best days are behind us.
The Independent, reviewing SNL UK, identified a ‘primary ideological diversion’ from the show’s American counterpart. It wasn’t a British brand of humour, our arcane references comprehensible only through the lens of UK pop culture. It was swearing. For fuck’s sake.
Photo by Asit on Unsplash.
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SNL UK and the Performance of Britishness
The UK’s edition of Saturday Night Live, the USA’s long-running late-night sketch show, premiered last Saturday with a cavalcade of British cliches of a piece with the tea-drinking, queue-loving, conversation-avoiding reputation we’ve garnered over the years. We should’ve known it was headed this way with the first promo clip Sky posted to social media, which saw host Tina Fey dressed as Mary Poppins, descending from the studio ceiling to offer the cast some help in putting the show together. Crumpets, anyone?
As someone without Sky TV, or the temerity to use an illegal pirating service, I’ve resorted to consuming last week’s show through the clips posted to YouTube. And, despite various dissatisfied, yet not outraged reviews, I quite liked it; an enjoyable enough impression of Keir Starmer, a much-commented-upon Princess Diana impression. It was at least funny enough to watch hungover.
But throughout the show, a performed Britishness persists, that feels greatly like a greatest hits album of a band who disbanded fifty years ago. Keir Starmer’s send-up cast him as some cowering subordinate to the US President, frightened of confrontation, while a Paddington sketch also got a look-in. And that Diana impression featured in a bloated sketch including Sir David Attenborough, Winston Churchill, and Sir Isaac Newton among others, brought together to discuss what makes Britain great.
What necessitates this signalling of our national identity through a coterie of romanticised icons? Comedian Stewart Lee contends that the show seems to be banking on being watched over the Atlantic, and making enough money there to justify its existence. It certainly seems as though we’re pitching a parody of ourselves and courting overseas viewership. I mean, how famous here is Tina Fey?
But beyond that, SNL UK accidentally recognises the present state of Britishness. National identity is a foggy idea at the best of times, but at this point British identity is so nebulous as to be indecipherable. We saw this with the should-they-shouldn’t-they flag-flying bonanza last summer; the principal conclusion from a weeks-long debate as to what our national flag represented was that it meant so little that people could feasibly claim it meant anything. Some cultures, most obviously America’s, centre their identity around an idea – in the USA’s case, the optimism of the American dream (hollow as it increasingly is). So what’s our idea? Cynicism? If that’s the case, the pessimistic attitude with which SNL UK’s announcement was treated feels far more British than anything seen in its debut. Britishness still exists in the minutiae of the nation – the pub gardens, the snide politeness. But you can’t have a national conversation around the prices at Wetherspoons, and sentiments of that ilk constitute the bulk of our national character.
So SNL UK presents Britishness as a succession of figures for whom the public have a penchant, not a nationality based on a sensibility or a set of values, with which it should be concerned. British identity, then, is intangible, remote; it’s not a culture, it’s a personality, and a distant one at that.
‘Two world wars and one world cup’ is perhaps the crystallisation of the traditional English, if not British, sense of national identity, and it’s a dead fantasy of a better past – that in many cases wasn’t that great after all, and at any rate is non-existent. For many, the present is unrelentingly bleak, and the future is yet to be built. But instead of renovating ideas for the future, the cultural movements of the day fetishise a perceived former glory, call it patriotism, and leave the culture malnourished and hollow. Fly a flag from a lamppost; the best days are behind us.
The Independent, reviewing SNL UK, identified a ‘primary ideological diversion’ from the show’s American counterpart. It wasn’t a British brand of humour, our arcane references comprehensible only through the lens of UK pop culture. It was swearing. For fuck’s sake.
Photo by Asit on Unsplash.
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