‘Saturday Night Live’ Can’t Escape This “Outdated” Part of Its Past
Greer Riddell is a London-based film and television journalist writing about comedy, streaming and the evolving media industry in the UK and USA. She works at Collider, covering the latest in film, television and entertainment through interviews, features, reviews and industry coverage.
Her recent brand collaborations include HBO, Warner Bros., Netflix, Hulu, Sky, Disney+ and DC Studios. She has covered titles including Saturday Night Live UK, Rivals, Scrubs, Stuart Fails to Save the Universe, Ludwig, Supergirl and Stranger Things.
Her recent interviews include Florence Pugh, Mike Faist and Christopher Abbott for Netflix's East of Eden, Taika Waititi and Jenna Ortega for Klara and the Sun.
When Saturday Night Live came to the UK, the British team behind SNL UK initially thought one of the American show's longest-running traditions was outdated. Cue cards seemed like an unnecessarily cumbersome way to deliver lines when an autocue offered a more advanced alternative. But with John Mulaney returning to host a new episode tonight, those handwritten cards will once again help keep Studio 8H running. The practical realities of producing a live sketch show quickly changed the British team’s perspective.
Speaking at the Edinburgh TV Festival 2026 earlier this summer, Phil Edgar-Jones, James Longman, and Liz Clare explained why the British production had come to rely on the very system it initially rejected, with help from veteran Wally Feresten, the head cue-card holder on the American Saturday Night Live for more than 35 years.
Their discovery highlights a fundamental problem with trying to modernize Saturday Night Live after 50+ years. Some of its quirky production methods are essential to the format because of how unique it is. The scripts change too frequently for the cast to memorize their lines, and the sketches depend on performers being able to read those changes without compromising the camera work. Cue cards solve both problems while allowing the show to remain flexible until transmission. For SNL UK, learning how to make the American format work has meant recognizing that not everything needs updating.
Why 'SNL UK' Can't Replace 'Saturday Night Live's Cue Cards With an Autocue
Cue cards are one of the most recognizable features of Saturday Night Live, yet their continued use can look strange in an industry where autocue technology is commonplace. The British team initially shared that view. Sky UK's Unscripted Originals Executive Director Phil Edgar-Jones explained at the Edinburgh TV Festival that the team questioned why the American production still used them, describing the reaction as one of disbelief.
Collider Exclusive · 8 Questions · 2 Minutes Which Viral TikTok Song Are You? Dreams · Running Up That Hill · Murder · Golden
Answer eight quick questions and we will tell you which one you are. All four of these blew up on TikTok, all four went back into the charts because of it, and three of them did it off the back of a film or a TV show.
🛹Dreams(Fleetwood Mac)
🔦Running Up That Hill(Kate Bush)
🪩Murder(Sophie Ellis-Bextor)
⭐Golden(HUNTR/X)
01
How do you use TikTok? Pick the one that sounds most like you.
02
What kind of song gets stuck in your head? One answer only.
03
What is your go-to weekend plan? Nothing booked, nowhere to be.
04
How would your friends describe you? Be honest.
05
What is your comfort watch? The one you put on without thinking.
06
Pick a drink. No wrong answers here.
07
How do you handle a bad mood? Pick the closest answer.
08
What do you want people to feel around you? Last one. This is the one that decides it.
Sound On Your Song Is…
A song going viral is not luck any more, it is a film scene, a TV needle drop or one perfect video doing the work a label used to do. Here is yours, what it says about you, and the story of how it took over.
Dreams
You are the calmest person in any room and you are not trying to be. One man filmed himself skateboarding to work with a bottle of cranberry juice, and it became the most relaxing thing on the internet, which is roughly the effect you have on people.
- You do not chase things, and somehow the good ones turn up anyway.
- That 2020 video put a song from 1977 back on the Billboard Hot 100 for the first time since it was released.
- Mick Fleetwood joined TikTok specifically to recreate it, which is the band blessing the whole thing.
- Your flaw is that unbothered and uninterested look identical from the outside.
Running Up That Hill
You feel everything at full strength and most people only see about a third of it. This is a song about wanting to swap places with somebody so they finally understand you, which is a very intense thing to make a pop single about.
- You are the friend people come to at two in the morning, and you never mind.
- Stranger Things season four sent it to number one in the UK in 2022, thirty-seven years after it came out.
- It made Kate Bush the oldest woman ever to top the UK singles chart, at sixty-three.
- Your risk is living in your own head for longer than the situation strictly requires.
Murder on the Dancefloor
You make an entrance and you enjoy it. This is a glittering disco record with something slightly wicked underneath, which is why Emerald Fennell used it for the last scene of Saltburn and why it worked so unbelievably well.
- You are the most fun person at the party and nobody is ever entirely sure what you will do next.
- Saltburn put a 2001 single back in the UK top 10 in January 2024 and into the US charts for the first time.
- It gave Sophie Ellis-Bextor her biggest streaming week ever, twenty-three years after release.
- Your weakness is that the entrance sometimes gets more planning than the evening does.
Golden
You want to be the best at the thing you do and you are not embarrassed about saying so. Golden is a song about stepping into what you were always capable of, sung by a fictional girl group who fight demons, and it beat every real artist on the chart.
- You set the bar high for yourself and you quietly expect everybody else to keep up.
- It spent six weeks at number one on the Billboard Hot 100, the longest run for a soundtrack song in a decade.
- KPop Demon Hunters became the most-watched film in Netflix history, which nobody saw coming.
- Your flaw is treating a quiet week as a personal failure when it is just a quiet week.
The problem was that Saturday Night Live is not a conventional scripted comedy in which performers can learn their lines during rehearsals and deliver the same dialogue when the cameras start rolling. Sketches are continually rewritten, and the final version may differ from what the cast has rehearsed earlier in the week or even at the dress rehearsal on the Saturday! Lead Producer, SNL UK, James Longman explained, “They know when they look at the cue card, what's on there is the final honest version of the show.”
The revisions do not necessarily stop when the show is about to begin either. Longman explained that changes can still happen during commercial breaks. “It's happening all the time,” he said. That is a particularly important consideration for a program built around topical comedy, where a sketch may need to respond to a developing story or a last-minute production decision. The ability to make changes right up to transmission is part of what gives Saturday Night Live its distinctive character, and cue cards allow SNL UK to preserve that flexibility. But wouldn't an autocue do the same?
An autocue would change how the sketches are filmed. Longman explained that cue cards allow the production team to control performers' eyelines, ensuring that they can read their lines while appearing to address another character. “We don't want people looking down the barrel of a camera,” he said. “It's drama. It's sketch.” If performers had to read from a fixed monitor, they could end up looking directly at the lens rather than at the person they are supposed to be speaking to. That would make the dialogue feel less like a conversation and more like a presenter reading from a script.
Cue cards can instead be positioned according to the requirements of each joke. Longman noted that the team can use smaller cards when space is limited or larger ones when a performer is farther away. This flexibility matters when sketches require different sets, blocking, and camera angles. A monitor is not always practical in a confined space, whereas a card can be placed wherever the performer needs it. The system allows the production to accommodate changing dialogue while maintaining the visual language of the sketch.
How Wally Feresten Trained 'SNL UK's Cue-Card Team for Live Television
Once the British production recognized that cue cards were essential, they had to learn how to use them properly. Writing dialogue on cards may sound straightforward, but the process requires speed, consistency and an understanding of how performers will read them on stage. Longman recalled that the team recruited experts in autocue operation to train as cue-card operators. “And they thought we were mad, too,” he said, describing their reaction to being taught a method that initially seemed less advanced than the technology they already knew.
To help the new team learn that system, SNL UK brought over Wally Feresten, who worked on the American Saturday Night Live for more than 35 years. Longman described him as “a legend” and explained that he taught the British team how to prepare and present the cards. Director Liz Clare described the cue-card team's work as a “dark art”, referring to “the speed and clarity with which you'd have to write” them.
'SNL UK' Adapted to the Cue Cards Perfectly
The production also had to consider the materials being used, with Clare explaining that the team needed non-toxic pens because operators could spend eight hours a day writing cards! The team uses different ink colors for different cast members, making it easier for performers to identify their lines quickly. The cards are also kept for future use. Clare explained that if a sketch returns in a later episode, the team can retrieve the existing set rather than write it all out again. Each sketch has three sets of distinct cards, and they are kept in a physical archive.
For performers, the adjustment can take some getting used to. Edgar-Jones recalled that Season 1 host Jamie Dornan was initially nervous when he had to read cue cards during a hostage sketch. Dornan reportedly wondered whether he could do the show at all, but by Saturday night he had “absolutely nailed it and loved it.” The technique requires performers to adapt, but it is a skill they can learn.
Saturday Night Live has used cue cards for decades, and their continued presence is not only a matter of preserving tradition. They allow the show to incorporate last-minute rewrites while giving performers the freedom to maintain natural eyelines and interact with one another on stage. SNL UK initially assumed that newer technology would offer a better solution, only to discover that the older method was better suited to the format it was trying to reproduce.
Saturday Night Live UK Season 2 Part 2 returns on Sky One in the UK in January 2027 and streams the next day on Peacock in the U.S.
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