A cast of unknowns, they keep saying about Saturday Night Live UK, whose success we’ve all been toasting this last seven days. But many of its stars have been known to comedy- and theatre-watchers for years, none more so than breakout star George Fouracres, he of the viral “What kind of Irish is your grandad?” video and of put-upon Keir Starmer cowering by his hotline to Trump. Over the last decade, Fouracres, 36, has made waves as a sketch comic, a solo performer and a Shakespearean actor at the Globe – playing Hamlet, no less. “To everyone who’s known George since he started performing,” says his old sketch partner, the standup Phil Wang, “this week has been no surprise at all. It was just a matter of time before everyone got to see how talented he is.”
I first encountered Fouracres in 2015 alongside Wang and Jason Forbes as one-third of Daphne, the then-latest – but highly distinctive – sketch group off the Cambridge Footlights production line. “From the beginning,” says Wang, “he had this real mastery of comedic timing, tone and just pure comedic instinct. I’d write parts for him at university” – including Long John Silver in a Footlights panto – “and the first time he read it out he got it if not exactly how I’d imagined it, then better than I’d imagined it. He just has this instinct for funny.” With Daphne, whose success on the fringe led to a Radio 4 series, Fouracres always drew the eye (or ear), a combustible performer from whom (whether as a pirate, a ruthless Willy Wonka or an unhinged northerner parody of Daphne from Frasier) you never quite knew what was coming next.
