A new comedian has joined SNL UK for season two, with Freddie Meredith announced as a brand new addition to the cast.
Comedian Meredith, who has acted in TV shows Big Boys and Such Brave Girls, will be a new permanent fixture alongside the 11 stars who steered the debut season to acclaim earlier this year.
Meredith’s casting follows his Edinburgh Fringe debut last month, which saw him nominated in the Best Newcomer category for his show Need a Light?, and he said signing up to the series was a “no-brainer”.
“It’s the most iconic comedy show and it looks like so much fun,” Meredith said. “It will undoubtedly inform everything I do for the rest of my career and I can’t wait for the experience.”
Meredith trained as an actor before finding himself drawn to comedy, and he gained a following after making short sketches online. He named Jamie Demetriou, Tim Key, Tina Fey, Nathan Fielder, Kristen Wiig, Steve Coogan, Steve Carrell and Julia Davis as his inspirations.
SNL UK will kick off its second season on Saturday (12 September) with guest host Jeff Goldblum and musical guest CMAT.
Last year’s guest hosts included Tina Fey, Jamie Dornan, Riz Ahmed and Ted Lasso actor Hannah Waddingham. After debuting with Fey, the series received a swell of support from the British public and comedy industry.
All 11 members of the original SNL ensemble will return. They include Hammed Animashaun, Ayoade Bamgboye, Larry Dean, Celeste Dring, George Fouracres, Ania Magliano, Annabel Marlow, Al Nash, Jack Shep, Emma Sidi and Paddy Young.
First airing back in March, the UK version of the long-standing and popular NBC comedy series was written off by sceptics before it even started, so much so that writer Bella Hull told The Independent that people were “frothing at the mouth for it to fail”.
The first episode was met with mostly positive reviews, with The Independent's Nick Hilton writing that the opener was in line with “the famously hit-and-miss format of SNL”.
For the most part, the show's viewers chose to give the show time to breathe rather than writing it off, and the positive reaction only grew, with the first series being extended from a six-episode run to eight.
In an interview with The Independent, comedian Nick Mohammed branded the show “the best thing that’s happened to British comedy” since Ricky Gervais’s sitcom The Office premiered in 2001.
Series two was confirmed in May, with the show returning for 12 episodes in total. Lorne Michaels, the creator and producer behind the SNL franchise, celebrated the news, saying that the UK version “keeps getting better every week”.
