The first season of Saturday Night Live UK drew to a close with its lowest audience numbers of the series as the programme faced tough prime time competition against this year’s Eurovision Song Contest.
Sex Education star Ncuti Gatwa guest hosted the finale episode, with 86,420 viewers watching at 10pm; down 28 per cent from its previous low of 120,000 when comedian Jack Whitehall hosted in April.
Gatwa’s viewership numbers were less than half of the 197,000 person audience Ted Lasso star Hannah Waddingham garnered last week.
Meanwhile, on the BBC, the Eurovision Song Contest was watched by an average of 5.2m people, with a peak of 5.9m, according to BARBA figures supplied to Deadline by UK ratings system overnights.tv.
SNL UK has received mixed audience and critic reviews since its launch in March, with some labelling the programme “promising” and others dismissing the British edition of the show as “cringe”.
“I know they had this SNL garbage in America but they exported it over here to the UK and it’s even bigger garbage…as if we haven’t got enough problems,” one person quipped alongside a clip of Gatwa in a Doctor Who sketch from the series finale.
However, another X/Twitter user argued that “live comedy on a Saturday night is what we’ve needed on tv for so long” and said “everyone involved” in the first series had “smashed it”.
It comes after Sky confirmed the sketch show would return for a second 12-episode series, which is scheduled to air this autumn.
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Lorne Michaels, the creator and producer behind the SNL franchise, celebrated the news, saying that the UK version “keeps getting better every week”.
The show has made stars of its cast of actors and comedians, who include George Fouracres, Jack Shep, Annabel Marlow, Hammed Animashaun, as well as Ania Magliano and Paddy Young hosting the Weekend Update segment. Emma Sidi, Ayoade Bamgboye, Larry Dean, Celeste Dring and Al Nash complete the line-up.
SNL UK suffered a dip in ratings after a solid start, which attracted 226,000 viewers for its first episode with Fey. The second episode, with actor Dornan, pulled in 205,000 viewers, with 130,100 tuning in for Ahmed’s episode the week after.
Last month, comedian and actor Nick Mohammed said that the show was “the best thing that’s happened to British comedy since” Ricky Gervais’s sitcom The Office aired in 2001.
He told The Independent: “I honestly believe that. To be cynical about it, it’s a shame that it’s taken Americans to come in with a format and say, ‘Just do it like that’. When I was starting out, there were so many production companies and channels wanting to emulate Saturday Night Live, and not having the guts to do it. But I think they’ve nailed it.”
