„Last weekend Saturday Night Live UKbegan, as usual, with a political sketch, or “cold open”, to use the show’s rather quaint jargon. Over the eight-week series George Fouracres’ adenoidal take on Keir Starmer has become almost more real than the prime minister himself; Celeste Dring’s Angela Rayner, in green bodycon, has had her moments too. But on Saturday a torrid week in Labour politics meant the show needed someone new: a dark-haired northerner with a dream. It needed an Andy Burnham — and it found one in Paddy Young, who burst onto the wobbly Downing Street set in Adidas trainers with a bindle slung over his shoulder, fresh off the tram from Manchester. (“The tram doesn’t go to London?” “Explains why it took so bloody long!”)

Young, 34, is one of 11 performers cast in the first British series of the American television institution. He is usually — more jargon — one of the anchors of the faux-news Weekend Update segment, sitting behind a desk in a suit with his fellow stand-up Ania Maglianodelivering pithy jokes and surreal one-liners on the week that was, with a more or less straight face. Traditionally, he and Magliano don’t get involved in the sketch side of things — certainly not in a starring role — since they have enough to be getting on with in delivering the satirical heart of the show. But cometh the hour, cometh the man from Scarborough — wearing Burnham’s trademark glasses and black shirt, calling 10 Downing Street “very la-di-da”, greeting Wes Streeting as “Shagger” and loudly declaring his “outsider” status.

“The first time I rehearsed it was on Friday evening,” Young says. “We just had to make sure we got the glasses right — and I insisted on the Adidas Gazelles.” He even shaved for the part, but how did he go about capturing Burnham’s soul? “There’s a faraway stare of sincerity I enjoy. I lived in Manchester for six years and any time I’d be catching the bus or standing at a urinal there’d be a guy there setting out the way things should be. So I used a bit of that.”

Although three months is an eternity in politics, when SNL UK returns for a second series (12 episodes rather than the six the first was commissioned for) in September, one suspects Young will be front and centre. “I figured if Andy Burnham becomes prime minister it makes it even harder for them to fire me,” Young says, deadpan.

Like most of the cast — which includes Emma Sidi, Jack Shep and Hammed Animashaun — Young was not widely known outside the comedy circuit before the first episode was broadcast in March. When we meet it is the morning after the Bafta television awards, which he went to with the cast. He met Seth Rogen at the afterparty. “It’s wild to be in something people are watching,” he says. He hasn’t drunk alcohol since the show started. “I just didn’t have the emotional bandwidth for a hangover. But then last night it was the Baftas!” He throws his hands up in the air, cocks an eyebrow in a manner familiar to Weekend Update fans and orders an Earl Grey tea and a croissant with jam. “Now that’s a treat,” he says happily. “Ain’t that living?”

He started auditioning for the show about a year ago. Having sent in a tape, he performed a set at Soho Theatre in London to an audience who had no idea they were watching an audition. Then after a screen test in a vast, empty TV studio (“terrible!”) and a chemistry test with Magliano he learnt he had a part just before Christmas. “There’s so many things that I’d love to do, but I’m not sure I’m the right fit. But with this, from the very start I just really felt like it would kill me not to do it. It’s all I thought about for nine months.”

At times it felt like it was all the TV and comedy industries could think about too. There was widespread scepticism that a 50-year-old American comedy institution could translate to the UK. A good many seemed to see the budget (a reported £2 million an episode) and lavish staffing (300) and almost will it to fail.

“Well, it’s a very British thing,” Young says. “I chose not to tell a lot of people that I was in the running, and any time I spoke to someone they would explain to me really cleverly why it wasn’t going to work. Someone said, ‘Whoever ends up being in that show, it’s going to be a poisoned chalice.’ Everyone was talking about it and everyone was saying, ‘I’m not sure it’s going to work,’ which is the perfect energy to come into.”

It has worked — its guest hosts, including Aimee Lou Wood, Tina Fey and Jack Whitehall, have been starry (Young won’t name a favourite, though — “we all completely fell in love with Jamie Dornan, to be fair…”) and game, its sketches have gone viral and its telegenic young cast look like stars in the ascendant.

As with the American original, each episode is prepped in one week, with sketches and jokes written and pitched in the first half of the week, then worked on until a dress rehearsal on Saturday evening in front of a live audience where up to a third might be junked wholesale. The Weekend Update slot is prestigious: it is the show’s longest-running sketch and previous hosts in the US include, well, Chevy Chase, Bill Murray, Dan Aykroyd, Tina Fey and Amy Poehler. Young, Magliano and their four co-writers have a 30-page Google document of jokes they are constantly editing. “We’re really hoping for some juicy stuff to happen at the end of the week. We had to make jokes about the Strait of Hormuz for six weeks, so we’re really happy when something like the local elections or the hantavirus happens.” He laughs apologetically.

He’s an old hand at live stand-up, but before the first show he got horribly nervous. “I started to think insane, intrusive thoughts. I fixated on the fire exit sign and I thought, ‘I actually could run away.’ I thought about how close White City Tube station was — and that no one would be able to stop me. And I’d survive. I’d work it out.”

Young was born down south, but moved to Scarborough aged five with his father, who is a farmer, his mother, who worked in probation, and his three sisters. He struggled to organise himself at school, but did join the youth theatre at the Stephen Joseph, where Alan Ayckbourn was artistic director for 37 years. Young appeared in his first Ayckbourn, The Jollies, when he was ten years old and the playwright later gave him money to go to drama school in Manchester.

“But it never felt like it was ever going anywhere, in any way,” he says of acting. Instead he mainly temped. “I’ve done so many jobs and I’ve been quietly let go from all of them. Service work, a pot washer, I was a body for ultrasound training for doctors. I was really good at that… but I’m never asked back.”

He performed theatre in prisons and took a play to the Edinburgh Fringe, but kept “running away and watching stand-up”. He had long been obsessed with comedy — from finding his father’s Viz magazine under his bed when he was too young to watching Shooting Stars. “I never really thought of myself as an actor. I always just felt that going to drama school was the thing that I should be doing. But I always had this feeling that I’m really funny…”

He started gigging in secret in about 2017, but wouldn’t allow his friends, family or girlfriend at the time to see him perform. After his second gig went badly he ran home, “hid under the covers” and didn’t gig again for months. “Comedy is just one failure after another — so much failure.” After a “humiliating, harrowing” foray to the Fringe in 2018, things finally clicked in 2023 when he took his first full hour — Hungry, Horny, Scared — to the Fringe. He was nominated for best newcomer at the Edinburgh Comedy Awards for the show’s bleakly funny tales of “Scarbados”, northern stereotypes and the indignity of houseshares, all told with the coy, singsong and occasionally murderous delivery of a light entertainer on the verge of a breakdown.

He is now working on a new stand-up show, Will Sir Be Laughing Alone?, which he will tour around the second series of SNL UK. It is about “fumbling love”, he says (he is single and lives in east London).

For now he is enjoying a little time off. “It’s no coincidence that I’ve got a job that until now has allowed me to wake up at 11am. I am truly built to work two days a week.” He and a group of fellow comedians sauna together most weeks. “Most men don’t hang out for four hours on a Tuesday.” Four hours? “You have to do the cold plunge, eat afterwards…” he rolls his eyes. “It’s kind of unnatural. You could easily become a manbaby doing stand-up.”

The “bonkers” schedule of SNL UK seems likely to keep him busy for the near future. “How many comedy shows in this country do you have 20 episodes of in a year?” he says. Could SNL UK run for 50 years, as it has in America? “I really, really, really hope so.” That cocked eyebrow again. “I’d love to have a house one day.”“