Sky is set to launch a British version of Saturday Night Live next year. The long-running American comedy show is now in its 50th continuous year of production, so one might — with some justification — wonder: why now?

There is a kind of grim, grinding inevitability to this move, coming as it does so very late in the day. SNL’s reputation as the knockout powerhouse of American entertainment is long gone. It has been many years since it last held that crown, and it seems to have lingered for decades in a shambling post-imperial decline, a similar fate to that of other survivors from the time when TV was a genuinely mass medium. Indeed, the world had almost forgotten it existed until Shane Gillis’s “CouplaBeers” sketch went viral last month.

But TV increasingly relies on name recognition and tested brands. A revival, or at least a variation on a familiar title, will all but guarantee a good opening night for ratings. Viewers will reliably tune in to see a new iteration of something well-worn. In recent times we’ve had the returns of hoary “franchises” including Spitting Image, Deal Or No Deal, Waterloo Road and Dancing On Ice, plus infinite variations of Star Trek, Star Wars and superhero flicks. The film industry is just as reliant on remakes and biopics of 20th-century musicians, which sell tickets thanks to nostalgia. On the small screen, this has taken on an increasingly surreal quality: a TV schedule which features All Creatures Great And Small, The Darling Buds Of May and Bergerac is alarmingly moribund.

When it comes to SNL in particular, there are other cultural considerations. The slightly tacky spectacle of the special guest host showing that they’re a good sport feels particularly American. That format worked a charm when TV was a mass medium, but those days are over. Thanks to the proliferation of online “content” sources, TV now has a comparatively niche audience. It is rare to have a broad coalition of viewers who are all on the same pop-cultural page. Unless, of course, it’s politicised slop like Adolescence, which captures social hysteria and reflects people’s hazy inchoate fears about things like the manosphere back at them. Apart from that, in a world of extreme political polarisation, how can you possibly produce a comedy show which appeals across the board?

SNL’s format might conceivably be a way to address the sorry lack of sketch comedy shows, which were once the bedrock of British television. But the British comedy industry appears to be stuck in an even more rarefied bubble than its American counterpart. If the American version of SNL can no longer generate enough reasonable material — and it can’t — then a British one absolutely can’t.

British TV comedy talent? We basically chased Graham Linehan, the most talented and successful writer of TV comedy of his generation, out of the country. There is in the UK neither the infrastructure nor the supply to produce a good weekly topical comedy show. Gone are the days of Vic and Bob, Harry and Paul, Mitchell and Webb. And the last thing the country needs is yet another “sideways look” at the week’s news. The Mash Report, Mock The Week, The Last Leg, Russell Howard’s Good News, Frankie Boyle’s New World Order, Have I Got News For You — all of them, like the current SNL, have skewed progressive, hideously conformist, obvious and dull.

SNL promises to seek out fresh British comedy talent. But why would someone with the spark of a Norm McDonald or Tina Fey put themselves through the high-pressure nonsense of television, when they can probably generate better income and status from instant, unmediated access to an audience via Instagram and TikTok?

There ought to be a moratorium on old brands in television. The medium is either finally dying or in the process of transforming slowly and painfully into something else. It needs new, 21st-century ideas to make it relevant again. A format from 1975 won’t cut it.

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Gareth Roberts is a screenwriter and novelist, best known for his work on Doctor Who.

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