I lived in California for a year. 1982. Ronnie Regan was president. Donald Trump was just a spoiled rotten rich kid grabbing pussies and being obnoxious in a not yet famous way. I was staying with a friend’s cousin for the first few days of my arrival. And I walked into the room to see him watching a comedy show. Which turned out to be incredibly funny. So I asked him what it was. “Saturday Night Live”, he replied. But it’s Tuesday, I commented, obviously missing something. Ahhhh, these are re-runs of ‘the old ones’. From the ‘70s. Saturday Night Live was, unsurprisingly, live on every Saturday night, at the time led by ‘new kid’ Eddie Murphy. But the old shows, the ‘originals’ were revered.

SNL has always been a massive springboard for comedy talent. The original line-up featured John Belushi (the funniest man who ever lived), Dan Aykroyd (the funniest-man’s best mate), Bill Murray (STILL funny, but now in an even more grumpy way), Chevie Chase (incredibly funny), Gilda Radner (so funny she married Gene Wilder; the second funniest man who ever lived) and a bunch of others who never made that leap to superstardom. Later there was Eddie Murphy, Tina Fey, the list goes on.

And because the program was live, it had a wild, raw, ‘anything can happen’ vibe. And quite often, anything did happen. When you have people like Belushi, not famous for their restraint, shit happened. Improvisation happened. By people who’d cut their comedy teeth doing improv. Which gave the ‘scripts’ an added dimension.

NBC basically gave a bunch of lunatic drunk stoners a prime time platform to go fucking wild. And they still are.

So one of the smaller, local, TV networks had the rights to the old shows and showed them every night of the week at 10pm. And at 10pm, every night of the week, if I was in, that’s where I’d be.

There’s always a ‘guest presenter’ for any particular show. And A-listers have queued up to do it. To go on and essentially get ripped apart by the regulars. Even Donald J Trump has been on it. Not someone who springs to mind when ‘self deprecation’ is mentioned.

And now they’ve made a movie of the early, early days. Called, inventively, ‘Saturday Night’, its directed by Jason Reitman, the son of Ivan Reitman, the man who produced Animal House and directed Stripes and Ghostbusters. All filled with SNL alumni. So surely his son is brilliant too, right? Like Hunter Biden? Like Brooklyn Beckham? We shall see. I’m going.

Happy Tuesday

A xxxx