‘Live from London, it’s Saturday night! Featuring Jimmy Carr! Katherine Ryan! And Romesh Ranganathan! And your host... Gemma Collins!’ Such is the nightmare vision of a British treatment of Saturday Night Live, which Sky recently confirmed will be cluttering your NOW TV home screen soon. The project will be overseen by SNL’s executive producer Lorne Michaels, a Sauron-like figure who excels at throwing talented young comics into the lava pits of 30 Rockefeller Plaza and spitting them out as network-friendly skit slingers. 

Much like Michaels, the show has attained near-mythical status despite being nothing more than a grab-bag of agonisingly long sketches featuring more dud gags than an evening with Joe Pasquale. The seal-clapping enthusiasm of its audience is the real killer. Perhaps Michaels owns a wing of Guantanamo Bay where he imprisons audience members in solitary confinement with only one five-minute clip of Kevin Hart for company. So relieved are they to be freed from their cages, they’ll applaud almost anything. ‘It’s Saturday night!’ Cue the wildest response to the days of the week since King Sargon I Of Akkad. ‘It’s a half-baked sexual innuendo!’ A further 35 minutes of whooping. ‘It’s fresh air!’ Oh, thank god I’m not in Lorne Michaels’ cell anymore. Thank the good lord for fresh air. Everyone give fresh air a standing ovation!!

The nausea-inducing echo of back-slapping has emitted from SNL for the past year in celebration of its 50th anniversary, during which time it has enjoyed dizzying highs (championing Andy Kaufman, discovering Kate McKinnon, providing inspiration for the sitcom masterpiece 30 Rock) and shit-the-bed lows (inviting Donald Trump to host, Adrien Brody’s Jamaican accent, everything about Colin Jost). And let’s not get started on Saturday Night, Jason Reitman’s recent masturbatory fantasy depicting Michaels as a have-a-go-hero amassing a stable of legendary comics.

SNL’s UK edition is a continuation of Michaels’ incredible hubris, evoking America’s colonial instinct of entering a country, waving its flag and bellowing ‘yeehaw, get off our new lawn before we shoot you etc.’ But it’s not likely to work. British comedy is great at lots of things, but an excess of self-congratulation isn’t one of them. Sketch shows that have gained a cult following in the UK (Limmy’s Show, The League Of Gentlemen, Smack The Pony) have worked because they revel in peculiarity more than broad satire, while Brit-led SNL knockoffs (10 O’Clock Live, The Friday Night Project) were received about as favourably as Sarah Sherman’s false teeth. 

There’s a slim chance that a UK transplant of America’s favourite sketch show could be decent, but only under these specific circumstances: a) execs take Michaels’ cash and do their best to ignore him; b) they hire a revolving door of untapped British talent and mould them into stars: Jimmy Carr will just have to fill the gaping void in his life with another game show on Dave; and c) audiences have their hands and larynxes forcibly removed before transmission to avoid excessive excitement. These surgical procedures will be shown in the opening credits as a warning to any Americans who dare to whoop during a UK comedy show. No amputations, no success. That last one is a dealbreaker.