WILL VIEWERS WATCH AN 88-YEAR-OLD’S APPEARANCE ON “SNL”?

Analysts will be keeping an eye on ratings for this weekend’s Saturday Night Live, which is being co-hosted (with singer Jay Z) by 88-year-old Betty White, who likely holds the record for the longest continuous career on U.S. television. (She started out as disk jockey Al Jarvis’s sidekick on a Los Angeles TV talk show in 1949.) Her appearance on SNL was instigated by a petition campaign started on the social network Facebook. In an interview appearing in today’s (Thursday) Boston Herald, White indicated that she isn’t concerned about some of the “adult” sketches presented on the satirical show. “I’ve always had a bawdy sense of humor,” she said. “My father was a traveling salesman and would bring jokes home, and if I got them, fine. If I didn’t, that’s fine, too. [He’d say,] ‘Honey, you can take that to school, but not that one.'” Meanwhile, the TVbytheNumbers blog has asked readers to predict what sort of ratings the SNL episode with White will generate. (It pointed out that the highest-rated show of the season featured former NBA star Charles Barkley as host — following the NFL Wild Card game — which drew a 4.4 rating among adults 18-49.) One reader predicted that it will get a 3.4 rating among adults 18-49 and a 20.0 among adults 70-99.