LOS ANGELES – Craig Ferguson is sitting in his tidy office at CBS’s Television City several hours before the taping of his nightly show (or “the shoo,” as he calls it), talking about growing up in the small town of Cumbernald, just outside Glasgow, Scotland. His father knew someone over at the shipyard who’d picked up some carpet remnants from a luxury liner being assembled, and thus, Ferguson swears, his family was the first in the neighborhood to get wall-to-wall carpet.
Since he took over nine weeks ago as host on “The Late, Late Show,” a post-Letterman, seldom-seen, insomniac’s delight, this has been part of his shtick: He loves to go on about the exaggerated bleakness of his Scottish youth, so bad there wasn’t even carpet: “I remember people came around, from the whole block, you know, just to have a look at our new carpet.”
People apparently love to listen to Craig Ferguson talk. His predecessor, Craig Kilborn, hosted for five seasons, and it was fine as far as it went, except for Kilborn’s slight, bratty chilliness – it was too snide, too oddly clinical, Kilborn’s detractors said.
Ferguson’s show already gives off light beams of jolliness, even as you get the feeling that it’s possibly a happy train wreck. In an age of snark, it’s almost too retro: A good-looking man walks out, has an accent, tells some jokes, makes chitchat, introduces a band, and nobody gets hurt.
Watching the shoo feels like you’ve bumped into him at the Farmers’ Market Starbucks. Ferguson talks about his ex-wife (they’re friendly; she runs a Pilates center and lives two doors from him) and 4-year-old son, Milo (he shares custody).
“I don’t try to put a positive spin on things when I talk to guests, or the audience,” he said. “That’s the reason I talk about my ex-wife on the show, or being a dad, or alcoholism, to say, yes of course I’m a member of the human race. …”
He’s charming: handsome in a shopworn way, at 42; blue-eyed, dark hair askew, deeply dimpled; slouching happily onto the set in a 6-foot-2-inch frame.
He addresses viewers at home as “my lovelies” or “cheeky wee monkeys” and does a regular bit where he pours himself a cup of tea from a proper silver tea set, inviting the audience to ask questions.
Ferguson’s ratings are up just slightly from Kilborn’s a year ago, to about 1.9 million viewers, and still somewhat below “Late Night With Conan O’Brien” on NBC, which draws 2.5 million.
There are odd little pops in Ferguson’s first demographic returns – men over 54, for example, are watching in greater numbers, and so are women that age. (With other spikes in younger female cheeky monkey departments.)
Yes, this is just another man in a suit sitting at a desk with a fake window view of twinkling lights, in a post-post-post-post-Carson era. But it’s also some elusive other thing, a lark: “This is a show that’s being born on the air,” Ferguson said.
CBS really just threw him on the air, with only two auditions and a few weeks’ notice – a man viewers knew only from his role as Nigel Wick, the unctuous boss on “The Drew Carey Show”; a man some viewers might not literally understand.
Now that Ferguson has buzz, the feeling around CBS is that they picked a nice guy.
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