Traitors with crabs to the Prince Andrew Plan: the 10 best SNL UK sketches so far

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Sexy dad swap, the anti-ageing cream so good everyone will think your husband should be in prison, and the long con to make King Charles look good … you can’t say Saturday Night Live UK hasn’t gone there! Here are the best skits

Saturday Night Live UK’s maiden voyage is almost complete: this Saturday, Doctor Who star Ncuti Gatwa will host the series one finale of the much-discussed spin-off of the American sketch institution. But it’s not goodbye – we already know the cast are returning in autumn for a bumper 12-week run, proof that Sky are pleased with how their pricey punt has turned out. As well they should be: predictions that SNL UK would be a national embarrassment have been categorically rubbished.

It hasn’t all worked. The opening monologues, in which celebrity guest hosts veer between gushing praise for the show and an eye-watering celebration of their own CVs, remain irredeemably American. And while the team have valiantly attempted to parody our current prime minister, mining comedic gold from Keir Starmer does seem to be an impossible task.

As for the skits, there have – as with every single sketch show in history – been misses. Yet week after week, we’ve also been treated to a stream of hilarious and gratifyingly weird material that has made SNL UK must-watch TV for comedy fans. And it’s not too late to get on board. Catch up with this rundown of the best sketches so far.

Undérage: The Anti-ageing Cream

For its debut, the show recruited a safe pair of hands: Saturday Night Live veteran Tina Fey guested as the first episode’s reassuringly slick host, easing cast and audience into the British offshoot. Yet it quickly became clear that this version wasn’t intending to hedge its bets in general. A face cream that makes you look so youthful everyone thinks your spouse should be arrested? “My skin looks so fresh my husband can’t go anywhere without being hunted by rightwing paedophile-catching militias!” brags one woman in the spoof skincare advert to end all spoof skincare adverts. It’s a premise so neat I can’t believe it’s never been done before – but thank goodness, because nobody could have executed it with a more perfect balance of provocation and peppiness.

The Budger

When it comes to timely comedy about technology’s deleterious impact on humanity, where on earth do you start? With the minuscule x’s in the corners of pop-up ads, that’s where! This sketch imagines the enshittification of the internet as the work of a crack team of hyper-caffeinated web developers who devote their lives to the cause. Do they get paid? “No, but let me ask you this,” counters Hammed Animashaun’s triumphant head of operations. “Do you get paid for your job?”

Beanz Bros

Jack Shep and Larry Dean are two Scottish brothers who run a food truck serving flavoured baked beans in this spot-on pastiche of the blokier corners of the culinary social media scene. Their heartfelt origin story hinges on the kitchen nous of their beloved nanny, Sue – who unfortunately turns out to be a depraved criminal. Cue their punchy sales pitch descending into a meditation on hereditary evil. (For some reason this masterpiece hasn’t been clipped online, but you can watch it as part of episode two.)

Traitors: A Very Confident Mistake

Most parodies of The Traitors seem to revolve around Claudia Winkleman’s fringe. This one revolved around the fact that contestants of colour often get banished first. It’s a near-the-knuckle piece of social satire, but this sketch lightened the mood by interrogating its uncomfortable truth through a crab-based lens. All-round great guest host Riz Ahmed plays the unfairly suspected party.

The Prince Andrew Plan

Yes, Jack Shep’s Diana, Princess of Wales was instantly iconic, but the same can’t quite be said for the confusing David Attenborough-based sketch it arrived in. So here’s the best cold open of the series instead, in which Shep plays a different member of the royal family. The Prince Andrew Plan has a spine-tinglingly clever premise: what if everything the Windsors have done over the past 30 years has been part of an MI5 conspiracy to make King Charles look good in comparison? Emma Sidi’s wide-gaited Fergie is an extra treat.

DadSwap

An app that matches you with your ideal dad via an “advanced algorithm”? Fine. But it might end up changing your life in ways you never intended. The twist in this sketch is far too good to spoil – more proof that, much like the original SNL, ensemble spoof adverts are a consistently winning format for this show.

Mastermind

This series has blessed us with the kind of left-field sketch comedy that was all over our screens in the 1990s and 2000s (Falling Down a Hill With Helen Birch, anyone?). Yet this skit proved it could also pull off crowd-pleasingly broad fare. Take a familiar quizshow and merge it with cosy British meme account-core and you get this setup about a Mastermind contestant (Jack Whitehall) whose specialist subject is gossip about people he doesn’t know as relayed to him by his mum.

Live From QVC’s Jewellery Store

If Shep has been the breakout star of SNL UK, Sidi has been the beating heart, and this sketch – which combines Vic-and-Bob-esque surrealism with Wood-and-Walters-style character comedy – is the perfect showcase of her powers. Sidi plays a QVC jewellery saleswoman who returns from sick leave with a really long finger. All the better to point out the twinkle of the stacking rings – until her other hand starts changing, too.

Posh Gits

Before watching this Made in Chelsea pastiche, I considered all the hours I’d spent tuned in to the banal doings of Binky, Proudlock, Toff, Habbs et al to be wasted ones. I was wrong. It was worth it to be able to appreciate these ludicrously named Sloanes remarking on the awkwardness of proceedings and then leaving each other “to it”. If that sounds like your run-of-the-mill reality show parody, rest assured that Posh Gits took the form to avant-garde levels of absurdity. Also not online (boo!) but watchable as part of episode six.

45 Seconds With Fouracres

Dressed in a frilly shirt and satin dressing gown, standing in a brown 1970s-style living room, a maniacal George Fouracres performs an a cappella song about Irish grandfathers. The best comedy always indulges the niche tastes of its creators, and the fact that the cast and writers have clearly been allowed to amuse themselves (with this sketch, especially) is yet another reason why SNL UK seems to be on to a very good thing.

• Television
• Saturday Night Live
• TV comedy
• Comedy
• Jack Whitehall
• Riz Ahmed
• features