SNL UK Series 2 Hosts, Tickets And Where It Is Filmed

Larry Dean played King Charles at a pretend Balmoral. He got the line that set the tone for the whole of Saturday night: “Don’t tell me you’ve spent all your Netflix money already”. Jack Shep’s Prince Harry had the comeback loaded: “It was $60 million. How long was it meant to last?” With that, SNL UK was back on Sky at 10pm, four months after its first run finished on 16 May.

Jeff Goldblum hosted the 12 September episode and CMAT was the musical guest. Deadline’s write-up of the cold open has Emma Sidi, as Queen Camilla, greeting the visitors with the sketch’s least comfortable line:

Hello, sweet Harry. And beautiful Meghan, as brown as ever.

Four days before that went out, Sky confirmed the next two bookings, which is the bit anyone chasing an audience seat actually needs. Jamie Demetriou hosts on 19 September with Royal Blood playing live; Amelia Dimoldenberg hosts on 26 September with Rachel Chinouriri. Both go out Saturdays at 10pm on Sky and NOW, from the same studio as the premiere. If you came here looking for the series 2 ticket ballot, the answer is that nothing about it has been republished since August.

Where is SNL UK filmed?

SNL UK is made at Television Centre in London, in studio TC1. Per Wikipedia’s production section, “The programme is broadcast from Television Centre, London, in studio TC1”. The same section has “the BBC (via its commercial subsidiary BBC Studioworks) providing studios and post-production”. Sky commissioned it; Universal Television Alternative Studio’s UK arm and Broadway Video co-produce. So Lorne Michaels’ British franchise extension is physically assembled inside the building the BBC used to run out of, using BBC Studioworks facilities and post. I find that funnier than most of the Weekend Update desk material.

On tickets: the route Sky published was a free ballot, opening at 10am on Friday 14 August, through a Microsoft Forms page. Sky has not put out a seat count, a minimum age, or a closing date. The 8 September host announcement doesn’t mention tickets at all. If you applied in August that’s your lot, and if you didn’t there’s no second published door. Last time round there was a stranger one. For the series 1 launch, Greggs ran a bus tour handing out free sausage rolls in Newcastle, Birmingham and at White City. Two pairs of tickets went via a prize draw in the Greggs app. Nobody has announced anything like that for this run, which is a shame. “Free sausage roll in Victoria Square” is a better ticket mechanic than a Microsoft Forms link.

Twelve episodes, and nothing on 3 October

Sky’s schedule lists six shows: 12, 19 and 26 September, then 10, 17 and 24 October. Read that twice and you’ll spot the hole: 3 October is simply missing, a week off in the middle of a six-week run. For a show written, rehearsed and performed inside each broadcast week, that blank Saturday buys the writing floor a week it doesn’t have to fill. Sky says more episodes follow in early 2027; Wikipedia logs series 2 as a twelve-episode series, so the shape is six now and six later, against the eight that ran from 21 March to 16 May.

The numbers behind that expansion are modest and worth stating plainly rather than leaving as vibes. Wikipedia’s ratings section records that the series 1 opener “drew an audience of 226,000 watching on the night of broadcast”. It adds that “Within seven days of broadcast, the launch’s audience more-than-doubled to 528,000”, with the run averaging 506,000 on the seven-day measure. Critically it did better than that: 88% of 16 reviews counted by Rotten Tomatoes were positive – sixteen being a sample you could sit round two tables in a green room – with a consensus reading “Without overthinking the formula, Saturday Night Live UK keeps things loose, confident, and more often funny than not”. Sky has ordered four more episodes than last time regardless of any of it, so whatever the commission is being judged on, it isn’t the 226,000 who sat through it live on the night.

Twelve people on the payroll, and eleven of them came off the circuit

All eleven of the original cast are back: Hammed Animashaun, Ayoade Bamgboye, Larry Dean, Celeste Dring, George Fouracres, Ania Magliano, Annabel Marlow, Al Nash, Jack Shep, Emma Sidi and Paddy Young. Freddie Meredith joins as the one new name. That is twelve performers in weekly paid work on a live sketch show, which in British comedy in 2026 is a genuinely unusual thing to be able to write down. A decent chunk of that list is made up of people who were doing twenty-minute spots in rooms above pubs a few years ago.

Set that against what the rest of the trade looks like right now. UK comedians reported average earnings of £21,143 in 2025. Working acts are down to around two and a half gigs a week while the touring calendar eats the mid-size rooms. Against that, a weekly TV sketch ensemble is a job that pays rent twelve times a year. The competitions that feed the same pipeline are running at scale too – 300 acts through 25 heats at one contest alone – and the bottleneck sits at the far end of that, in the number of paid slots, a point 47 MPs put in writing this year.

One more thing from the premiere, which LateNighter flagged and I keep thinking about. George Fouracres played Keir Starmer in series 1. In Saturday’s cold open he played the new Prime Minister, Andy Burnham, turning up in a yellow Manchester badge to offer the nation a beer, with the line “I’m the new PM, and I’m nothing like the last one”. The government changed and the casting didn’t move an inch. Somewhere in TC1 there is a rail with one suit on it marked PM, and whoever holds the job, Fouracres is wearing it.

Sources

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About River Leanox

River Leanox edits Open Comedy's newsroom. Coverage runs across stand-up's full ecosystem: comics on the rise, club owners booking the rooms, festivals, specials, and the working-comic economics behind the laughs. Tips, corrections, and counter-arguments welcome at river@opencomedy.com.

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Sky makes SNL UK in a BBC studio, and Demetriou hosts next