Okay, let's watch clips of every single comedian just cast in the British SNL

We’ve known for about a year at this point about the U.K.’s plan to import Saturday Night Live across the Atlantic, with an official British version going into production under Lorne Michaels’ oversight. (It’s actually part of a long tradition of countries trying to import SNL, usually to extremely limited success; of the 14 countries that have tried, only a handful—Egypt, Germany, Italy—went any kind of multi-season distance, and only South Korea’s version is currently on the air.) Right out the gate, we’d note that the sheer amount of British sketch comedy out there at the moment threatens to make Saturday Night Live less of a unique beast than it is in the States, where its sheer institutional presence and rarity in network TV is probably its most potent marketing tool. Even so, there’s a fascinating question lurking at the heart of the plan, one that Sky TV has now officially answered: Which British comedians do you cast to start a brand new Saturday Night Live?

Rather than rattle off a list of credits for the show’s just-announced cast—Hammed Animashaun, Ayoade Bamgboye, Larry Dean, Celeste Dring, George Fouracres, Ania Magliano, Annabel Marlow, Al Nash, Jack Shep, Emma Sidi, and Paddy Young—we figured it’d be better to see them in motion, so we’ve collected clips of as many of the 11 newcomers as we can. We have also, because we are incapable of not doing this, noted which of them have done a season of Taskmaster. (It’s Ania Magliano and Emma Sidi, natch.)

First up: Hammed Animashaun, who American audiences might actually know from his role on Prime Video’s Wheel Of Time adaptation. (He played the tree guy, Loial.) Here he is (briefly) in his recent U.K. comedy series Black Ops:

Next: Ayoade Bamgboye, who won Best Newcomer at Edingburgh in 2025, here in a sketch for Channel 4’s Comedy Playground:

Then we’ve got Scottish stand-up Larry Dean:

And Celeste Dring, one half of comedy duo Lazy Susan: