Ratings for “Saturday Night Live UK” dropped after two episodes.
The second episode of the live comedy show, which opened with a skit about Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor and the Epstein scandal, attracted 205,000 viewers, up from the first episode’s 226,000.
Fifty Shades star Jamie Dornan took over hosting duties from Tina Fey and was accompanied by musical theater actor Wolf Alice.
The show will be broadcast in the UK on Comcast-owned pay TV channel Sky One at 10pm.
Ratings also fell slightly from 3.2% in the first week to 3.17%, according to official BARB statistics provided by overnights.tv.
But on YouTube, the Prince Andrew sketch garnered 829,000 views in 14 hours, followed by the hostage sketch in which Jamie Dornan and SNL UK star Annabelle Marlowe discuss their characters’ relationship status, which had nearly 206,000 views in 13 hours.
In the 10pm slot on the main free-to-air channels, BBC One’s News accounted for the majority of viewers with an average of 1.6 million viewers (20.95% share), followed by ITV1’s The Jonathan Ross Show with 1.1 million viewers (16.59% share) and Channel 4’s 2022 Halle Berry sci-fi disaster film Moonfall with almost half of the viewers. “SNL UK has just 126,000 viewers (2.96% share).
Saturday’s No. 1 show was the competition-style “Gladiators,” which had an average audience of 3.3 million viewers and a viewership rating of 32.69%. However, it was broadcast much earlier in the evening (5.45pm) on the free-to-air network BBC One. Next was ITV 1’s ‘Britain’s Got Talent’ (3.2 million viewers, 29.66% rating), followed by BBC One’s ‘Michael McIntyre’s The Wheel’ (2.7 million average viewers, 25.09% rating).
“SNL UK,” executive produced by “Saturday Night Live” creator Lorne Michaels, launched in the U.K. last weekend with a star-studded episode featuring Michael Cera, Graham Norton, Regé-Jean Page and Nicola Coughlan.
The third episode next week on April 4th will be hosted by Riz Ahmed with musical guest Kasabian.
