Saturday Night Livid

This is how the (near weekly) conversation goes...

Me: Will I be let down again?
Her: Yes.

The subject matter is whether I will enjoy the "legendary", "culturally crucial" and, most importantly, "funny" Saturday Night Live. If we're in at 11.30pm on said night, I'll tend to tune in hoping that I might catch one consistently good episode. Here are the things I know about SNL: it's been going 30 years and used to feature famous American comedians before, presumably, their successful careers meant that they didn't need to do the show anymore. And thus the baton would be passed (though clearly not in person) to the next batch of hip, young gunslingers who would send Americans off into a happy, content sleep. Oh, and there are musical guests too which, when all's said and done, should make for the most enjoyable 90 minutes you're likely to have, next to watching Chelsea actually losing a football match.

So why does it not do it for me? Last night's programme should have succeeded. The host was Scarlett Johansson, the world's oldest 21 year old and, possibly, the hottest actress on the scene. She starred alongside SNL alumn Bill Murray a few years back so surely some of his comic timing would have rubbed off? The band was Death Cab For Cutie, an act everyone seems to like...even if these people have never heard them because you're supposed to enjoy them. It says so right there in the music magazine just to your right in your living room. They played two songs and didn't exactly seem thrilled to be there, sounding flat and moving their heads in a disturbing manner. The crowd cheered but didn't mean it. Our host, meanwhile, allowed herself to appear in lame sketches, cleavage revealing costumes and tried to sing her heart out whilst wearing a wig. The crowd cheered but (by now I'd worked out) this was because they weren't outside in the pouring rain. And that, as well as some well intended cartoons that never hit the mark, was that. Maybe SNL is just running the same course as a relationship gone sour: it's not you, it's me. Perhaps you need to be American to "get" it. Or if Scarlett is reading this, she'll retort that the show's humour went above my head and was lost in translation. Do you see what she did there?

Still, let's do it all over again next Saturday. Peter Sarsgaard is hosting and he's an amazing actor with a surname you'd just love to put down over a triple word score on a Scrabble board, if it were allowed. And The Strokes are going to perform! They're only, like, New York's coolest band of our lifetime who transformed music with their debut album Is This It. But what odds that will be my reaction come the end of the programme?