When Ania Magliano was asked to join the Saturday Night Live UK team to co-present the Weekend Update segment, it was the latest staging post in a career that has been snowballing ever since she received an Edinburgh Comedy Award nomination in 2023. Last year the 28-year-old was a Taskmaster contestant and four days after SNL UK finishes in May she heads out on her biggest tour yet.
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“My new show is called Peach Fuzz, after the hair on your face. It’s a part of your body that’s soft and nice, but also a lot of people don’t like it,” she explains. “The idea came from something that my therapist said, that my head and body are very disconnected. She thought I should try to integrate those two things.”
Magliano’s humour has a skilful way of shuttling between low and high culture. In previous shows the Cambridge graduate confessed to checking the Instagram account of her boyfriend’s ex and riffed on Henry VIII. This time it’s Sabrina Carpenter and the suffragettes: “With Sabrina it’s like how can we both be performers but be so different?”
“On Saturday Night Live you’re contained in a way, whereas I think stand-up is a real slice of my life — me unchained”
Working on SNL UK is about as intense as comedy gets. Her topical Weekend Update slot with Paddy Young can all change if there is late breaking news. “Everything has to be looked at by our lawyers. I’ve now got a much better understanding of the laws of contempt of court. I’ve been really lucky doing it, but it’s different to my tour in the sense that you’re contained in a way, whereas I think stand-up is a real slice of my life — me unchained.”
Working on a TV comedy can be a serious business but that doesn’t mean there are no laughs off-screen. “Our head writer, Charlie Skelton, sent us a WhatsApp message saying he’d been fired. It was a Wednesday in the middle of production and I really panicked. Then I checked the date and it was April 1.”
Magliano, whose father is Italian and mother is Polish, clearly had an ambition to perform from an early age. “I was always putting on plays for my parents. I think they were like, ‘We’re gonna have to support this because she can’t do maths to save her life.’”
At school in Buckinghamshire she certainly wasn’t the class clown. “I was shy. Then when I moved to sixth form I made a conscious effort to have a different personality. There was a girl who was really funny and I just put in my head the mantra of ‘what would she do in this situation?’”
Since then everything has clicked. In the early days Magliano suffered from nerves but a pre-show ritual solved the problem. “The director of my Edinburgh Fringe show, Jordan Brookes, suggested meditation. I got really attached to that, but there was no dressing room, so I did it in the toilet. And because it worked I now always meditate in the toilet.”
Saturday Night Live UK is on Sky One and Now, 10pm, Saturdays. Ania Magliano’s UK tour starts on May 21; aniamagliano.com
