13 December 1975: Saturday Night Live is put on time delay for the first time
ADVERTISEMENTToday, many live broadcasts on TV aren’t truly live. Instead, broadcasters will transmit the feed with a delay of a few seconds. It’s a simple procedure that gives them leeway in case something unrehearsed happens that can’t be shown on screens.
Time delays are used to save daytime audiences from expletives or from sports broadcasts accidentally showing a gruesome injury, violence or intruders with a cause.
The time delay hasn’t always been such a mainstay of live television formats though. Back in the 70s, most television that was called “live” was in fact live.
This was the case with Saturday Night Live. Launched in 1975 as NBC’s Saturday Night, SNL is one of the longest running variety shows on US TV. Created by Lorne Michaels, SNL’s format hasn’t changed much since its inception in 1975. A celebrity guest host leads a troupe of regular comedians who perform live sketches and a musical art will also perform.
Recorded at the NBC’s Studio 8H at Comcast Building (known as 30 Rock) in front of a live audience, the show was historically broadcast live across the US’s Eastern and Central Time Zones, with more westerly regions of the US receiving a recorded version later in the evening.
However, on this day for SNL’s seventh episode, NBC decided it couldn’t allow the show to broadcast live as it had done so for the previous six.
The reason? NBC was concerned about what their next guest host would do. Richard Pryor was the booked guest host. At the time, Pryor was the most famous Black comedian in the US. He had just won a Grammy Award for his comedy album ‘That Nigger’s Crazy’ and starred in the Mel Brooks film Blazing Saddles alongside Gene Wilder.
Michaels knew Pryor was the perfect host for his nascent show. But studios heads were concerned the comedian – known for his comedy about race relations, his expletive-heavy speaking manner, and a slightly worrying predilection for cocaine – would be too controversial for live broadcast.
At first, NBC outright disallowed Pryor as host, but after Michaels threatened to walk out, they relented with the suggestion of a seven-second delay.
The delay suggestion was a big deal for multiple reasons. The first was that it was an insult to Pryor, who – when he found out after the fact – objected to being treated differently to other (White) comedians.
The second issue was it hadn’t been done before. To assuage their concerns about putting a Black comedian on live TV, NBC had to re-engineer their taping machines so that the show would be taped on one machine and then transferred to a whole other machine for broadcast, creating the delay.
When the show went out, it made history as the first time SNL was hosted by a person of colour. A particularly famous sketch from Pryor’s episode was a word association sketch between him and Chevy Chase.
SNL has only used a time delay twice since Pryor’s episode. First for the 1986 episode hosted by Sam Kinison and again for the 1990 episode with Andrew Dice Clay.
