IRL and URL?
I was curious to see how the SNL UK launch would go¹ and jumped on this clip as soon as I saw it in my YouTube feed.
This clip has some good bits in it - Norton's rubbing of Fey's arm is probably the best part² but there was something which didn't quite work, and I think it was typified by the whooping and crowd applause that kept interrupting the flow of the material.
You cannot serve two masters contexts
This reminds me vividly of something I regularly experienced toward the tail-end of Covid-era of zoom teaching. As high-school students returned to high-school classrooms, there was an awkward crossover period of having one or two of the covid remnant tuning in via a laptop from home. Whether we liked it or not, we had to livestream what we were teaching so that the distant learner could at least stay in the game. It was admittedly a bit of a sad affair seeing this gloomy face clearly bored but parentally-obligated to attend.
As an instinctive showman³ I wasn't keen to let them simply co-exist in a digital box - I wanted to be engaging and to draw them into the great time we were having in the flesh and blood world⁴ - so I would work much harder to talk directly to them, to not allow them to disappear into the Ethernet. In other words I was trying to build a viable bridge between IRL and URL.
The problem with this was that I could never quite get the balance right - attention and care for one context usually dominated with the other group losing out. After having a bit of banter with student X online I frequently spotted very bored (usually doodling) students sitting in the back of my actual room who had essentially tuned out. I frequently felt I had failed the people who had turned up for the sake of the ones who hadn't.
Eventually I made my peace and would openly acknowledge to the zoom student that this was never going to be as good as in-person education. I hope they found some of the experience helpful but I have always feared the worst.
For me, this is the EXACT tension that was playing out in that SNL clip above: I felt increasingly alienated because I wasn't there. Whoever was whooping and interrupting the flow of material was feeling something in the room that just didn't (or couldn't) which meant a bleaker sense of distance.
Identifying the rift and building a meaningful bridge
The problem facing the SNL UK team - as they seek to establish a foothold in the media landscape - is to find a way of making the remote experience feel as good as being in the room. I am certain Sky are forking out a lot of cash to make it work.¹ One of the most important strategies going forward is to figure out how to repeat what Graham Norton was doing when he rubbed Tina Fey's arm in humorous mock reassurance: he was reading the cultural dissonance between two contexts and then leaning into it as a kind of human bridge.
This perhaps outlines my beef with the promise of AI and scaled up learning: it takes a skilled listener to spot the rifts and then to bridge them.
¹ I wish them well and hope that they find their groove. I know that SNL (US) has its issues but there's a lot that I love about it as well. Yes I used this footnote twice because it’s easy to be full of snark online these days. It is hard to make something good and we find it way too convenient to participate in the demolition business.
² Graham Norton has developed an instinct for reading the cultural rifts in the room and doing something very funny by awkwardly and intentionally sitting himself right in the middle of that divide - you can feel it in this very moment and it is very funny. Up until that point the Tina Fey persona is trading off of some kind of transatlantic-comedic-royal-family-entitlement persona. She has certainly earned the right, but with SNL UK you have to be better than that - something which I think the sketch is acknowledging with Sera et al.
³ Imagine an out of shape Huge Jackman huffing his way through those routines in a slightly unfit manner.
⁴ Honest.
