Amelia Dimoldenberg swaps the chicken shop for live sketch comedy as she hosts Saturday Night Live UK

The Chicken Shop Date creator takes centre stage on Sky One this Saturday, joined by indie-pop star Rachel Chinouriri for the latest episode of SNL UK.

Amelia Dimoldenberg is about to find out what happens when her trademark awkward pauses, deadpan humour and celebrity flirting are taken out of the chicken shop and dropped into the high-pressure world of live sketch comedy.

The award-winning host, writer and producer will host Saturday Night Live UK on Saturday, September 26, with acclaimed British singer-songwriter Rachel Chinouriri serving as the night’s musical guest.

The episode airs at 10pm on Sky One and NOW, as the second series of the British adaptation of the legendary American sketch show continues.

For Dimoldenberg, the appearance comes at a particularly interesting moment in her career. Her hugely successful internet series Chicken Shop Date — the show that turned her deliberately uncomfortable celebrity interviews into a global phenomenon — is itself coming to an end after 12 years.

Now, rather than sitting opposite a famous face over chips and chicken, Dimoldenberg will have to perform in front of a live audience, tackle sketches and deliver the kind of unpredictable live television for which Saturday Night Live is famous.

And there could hardly be a more fitting guest for the episode than Chinouriri, whose intimate indie-pop songs have established her as one of the UK’s most distinctive young artists.

Who is Amelia Dimoldenberg?

Amelia Dimoldenberg is a London-born comedian, broadcaster, writer and producer best known as the creator and host of Chicken Shop Date.

The concept sounds simple: Dimoldenberg meets a celebrity in a chicken shop and conducts an interview as though they’re on a date.

In reality, the format became famous for its wonderfully uncomfortable silences, deliberately awkward questions and Dimoldenberg’s famously deadpan persona.

The project began in 2014, initially as a magazine column, before becoming a video series on YouTube. Over the years she has interviewed an extraordinary range of stars, including Billie Eilish, Andrew Garfield, Jennifer Lawrence, Cher, Paul McCartney and numerous major names from music, film and sport.

Dimoldenberg studied fashion journalism at Central Saint Martins, and her career subsequently expanded well beyond Chicken Shop Date. She has worked across television and digital entertainment and established her own production company, Dimz Inc.

She has also become a familiar face on Hollywood’s red carpets. In 2026 she returned for a third year as the Academy’s official Oscars social-media ambassador and red-carpet correspondent, interviewing stars during awards season.

What happened to Chicken Shop Date?

In September 2026, Dimoldenberg announced that Chicken Shop Date would be coming to an end after more than a decade.

The decision marks the close of the project that made her famous, although Dimoldenberg has indicated that she has plenty of other creative ambitions ahead of her.

That makes her SNL UK appearance particularly intriguing: the show is another major step from internet creator to mainstream entertainment host.

Who is Rachel Chinouriri?

Rachel Chinouriri is a London-born singer-songwriter who has emerged as one of the most distinctive voices in British indie and alternative pop.

Born to Zimbabwean parents and raised in Croydon, Chinouriri developed her sound through a mixture of indie rock, pop and electronic influences. She studied at the BRIT School before releasing music independently and subsequently signing with Parlophone.

Her breakthrough came with songs including “So My Darling” and “All I Ever Asked”, while tracks such as “Never Need Me” and “The Hills” helped establish the sound that would define her debut album.

That album, What a Devastating Turn of Events, arrived in 2024 and received widespread critical acclaim. Its songwriting deals with relationships, identity, self-worth and deeply personal experiences, while drawing heavily on the indie and pop music of the early 2000s.

Chinouriri has also spoken publicly about the experience of being categorised by parts of the music industry according to her race rather than the actual sound of her music. Her work has subsequently become an important part of the increasingly diverse British indie-pop landscape.

A new album is on the way

Her SNL UK appearance arrives just weeks before her next major release.

Chinouriri’s second album, I Think I Spoke Too Soon, is scheduled for release on October 16, 2026 via Parlophone/Atlas Artists. The project follows her acclaimed debut and moves further into synth-pop while retaining her emotionally direct songwriting.

The album includes the recently released “One Song Away From Crying”, making her SNL UK performance a timely showcase for an artist entering the next phase of her career.

Who is in the SNL UK cast?

The programme’s ensemble cast is made up of British comedy performers from stand-up, theatre, television and the live comedy circuit.

The returning cast members for series two are:

• Hammed Animashaun — known for Black Ops and theatre work.
• Ayoade Bamgboye — a comedian and performer with Edinburgh Fringe experience.
• Larry Dean — stand-up comedian who has appeared on Live at the Apollo and the Royal Variety Performance.
• Celeste Dring — one half of comedy duo Lazy Susan, also known for This Country.
• George Fouracres — an actor and comedian with extensive theatre credits.
• Ania Magliano — stand-up comedian and Taskmaster performer.
• Annabel Marlow — performer and comedian with theatre credits including Six.
• Al Nash — comedian and performer who has appeared on Michael McIntyre’s Big Show.
• Jack Shep — comedian, writer and performer known for Big Boys.
• Emma Sidi — comedian and actor known for Starstruck and Alan Partridge’s live shows.
• Paddy Young — comedian and performer known for Everyone Else Burns.

They are joined for series two by Freddie Meredith, whose credits include Such Brave Girls and Big Boys. Sky confirmed his addition to the cast in September.

The ensemble operates in the same broad tradition as the American Saturday Night Live cast: a group of performers who can switch rapidly between celebrity impressions, topical satire, original characters and live sketches.

How are the ratings?

The first British series got off to a sizeable start by Sky standards.

The March 2026 premiere, hosted by Tina Fey with Wet Leg as musical guest, attracted 226,000 viewers overnight, representing a 3.2% share of the television audience at the time.

The second episode, hosted by Jamie Dornan, drew around 205,000, while later episodes fluctuated considerably. The first series finale, hosted by Ncuti Gatwa, attracted 86,420 overnight viewers, although it faced major competition from the Eurovision Song Contest that evening.

Importantly, overnight television figures do not tell the whole story for a programme available through catch-up and streaming. The launch episode’s seven-day consolidated audience was reported at more than half a million viewers.

Series two therefore represents another test of whether the UK format can build a regular audience beyond its initial curiosity factor.

The second season launched on September 12 with Jeff Goldblum and CMAT, followed by Jamie Demetriou and Royal Blood on September 19. Dimoldenberg and Chinouriri are next.

When is Amelia Dimoldenberg’s SNL UK episode?

Saturday, September 26, 2026

Host: Amelia Dimoldenberg
Musical guest: Rachel Chinouriri
Time: 10pm
UK: Sky One and NOW

The show is broadcast live each week, with celebrity hosts appearing alongside the regular cast and a musical guest. The format also includes a British version of the show’s famous Weekend Update segment.

How to watch SNL UK in Britain

UK viewers can watch Saturday Night Live UK on:

Sky One — live at 10pm on Saturday, September 26.

NOW — the episode is also available to NOW subscribers, with catch-up viewing available after the broadcast. Sky describes itself as the official UK home of the programme.

The programme has a 15 rating, with Sky citing elements including strong language, sexual jokes and innuendo, mock violence and brief nudity among the reasons for its classification.

How to watch SNL UK in the US

American viewers don’t need to miss out on the British edition.

Saturday Night Live UK is available on Peacock in the United States, with new episodes streaming on Sunday evenings following their UK broadcast.

That means Dimoldenberg’s September 26 episode will be available to US audiences on Sunday, September 27, via Peacock.

For American SNL fans, it’s a chance to see how the format translates when the jokes, political references, celebrity culture and comic sensibilities are distinctly British.

The Amelia Dimoldenberg moment

There is an appealing symmetry to Dimoldenberg taking the SNL UK stage just as Chicken Shop Date reaches its conclusion.

For more than a decade, she made a career out of putting famous people in deliberately awkward situations and allowing the silence to become the joke. Saturday Night Live demands something rather different: speed, characters, live performance and the ability to recover when something inevitably goes wrong.

But the underlying skill is remarkably similar.

Dimoldenberg has built her reputation around timing, personality and making celebrities behave in ways audiences don’t normally see.

On September 26, she’ll be the celebrity on the other side of the camera — and, for one Saturday night at least, the chicken shop is being replaced by live television from London.

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