“First thing you will never see on this show,” Craig Ferguson warned at the outset of his tenure hosting The Late Late Show on CBS: “Tom Cruise.”
On his first broadcast as the show’s new host, on January 3, 2005, Ferguson, at that time best known in America for his work on The Drew Carey Show, was setting—and addressing—the famously low expectations for his show.
It was a forgone conclusion that he would not be welcoming the same level of guests as the top dogs in the preceding time slot: his lead-in (and boss) on CBS, David Letterman, and Jay Leno over on NBC. Nor did anyone expect him to pose a serious threat to his direct competitor, Conan O’Brien, who the previous year had inked a new deal that included a guaranteed inheritance of the genre’s most venerated name, The Tonight Show.
No. At this moment, Ferguson was just a Scotland-born, forty-two year-old host trying to introduce himself to American late-night viewers and make the best of an opportunity to play around in the hour following Letterman. “Mr. Ferguson faces steep ratings competition,” Kate Arthur wrote for the New York Times on the first day of 2005, describing the Late Late Show franchise as the “perennial second-place finisher” to O’Brien.
But Ferguson, with the charming, nonchalance that would endear him to fans, had a plan. “My gimmick is that I’ll be using a Scottish accent for the entire show,” he told the Associated Press in the days before the first broadcast. “You know, it’s out there, but I think it will work.”
Ferguson, on his first broadcast (which can be viewed in its entirety at the top of this post), wasted no time expressing his homeland pride. The show begins in the writers’ room, with Ferguson, off camera, giving a pump-up speech to his staff. Before long, it becomes clear he is channeling William Wallace: cut to Ferguson with long hair and face paint. “You may take our lives,” Ferguson declares to his enemies, “but you will never take our freedom!” Silence. “Good. Good,” he says. “Then let’s do the show.” Cut back to his confused writers. “Who was that guy,” one asks. “Oh, that’s the new host,” another replies. “What is he, like Dutch or something?”
Low-hanging fruit of a Braveheart joke aside, the opening captures perfectly the duality of the moment into which Ferguson had just entered: a mountain to climb but the skill to make a damn good attempt.
His outsider status was not restricted to being the only non-American host on late night (he would become a US citizen three years later). Ferguson was also, like O’Brien had been twelve years earlier, deeply inexperienced as a broadcaster. When Tom Snyder launched the Late Late Show franchise in 1995, he was nearly sixty, and had hosted numerous programs, including Tomorrow, the first regular late-night show to follow Johnny Carson’s Tonight Show.
Craig Kilborn, Snyder’s Late Late Show successor, had already been a SportsCenter anchor and the first host of The Daily Show before taking over hosting duties from Snyder.
But what Ferguson lacked in direct experience he made up for with wit, charm, and poise, all of which are evident in this first episode. From the opening monologue, he comes across as eager and willing to be self-deprecating, understanding such jokes as necessary tools on the path to building the best version of The Late Late Show, which he eventually did.
“I’m the new host,” he said, an ironic introduction to the uproarious studio audience, but a real one, perhaps, for the more casual viewer at home. “Yup. Yes. I was caller number five,” Ferguson said. He continued: “And I’ve got to be honest, I’m the happiest man alive. Well, except perhaps for Conan O’Brien.”
Here, Ferguson is getting it all out in the open at the top: his low name recognition, the beloved, ratings behemoth he now faces. And then, of course, comes the whole bit about being Scottish. “It’s amazing how far you can go in this country,” he said. “Can you believe that when I arrived here almost ten years ago, I had an accent?” Every doubt that audiences and critics have, he, like William Wallace, is running straight towards.
Ferguson’s standing monologue runs only a few lines longer. A la Seth Meyers, he soon retreats to the desk, where he appears a bit more comfortable. Verne Gay of Newsday wrote that Ferguson “seemed both jubilant and bewildered.”
It is behind the desk where Ferguson begins to more substantially introduce himself and his show. The best bit here is one about the bits and other business they will not be doing on the show. This is where the whole Cruise joke comes in. “Another thing you’ll never see on this show is a wacky comic friend, a little sidekick,” Ferguson said, adding that the network pushed for him to have one.
Ferguson then introduces his alternative to the sidekick the network had pushed for: “The Vaguely Racist Parrot.” Cut to a red parrot perched on a stick on the opposite side of the studio from Ferguson. After a joke at the expense of the French, the parrot pivots to the host. “Craig Ferguson has a tiny penis,” the bird proclaims. Ferguson denies the charge. “I had to get a bigger desk,” he says, gesturing to the larger-than-normal host’s desk before him.
The crowd loves it. But Ferguson urges them to stop. “Do not applaud a penis joke,” he says, hands raised in a halting posture. “You know what they’ll do to me in the reviews if I do too many penis jokes?”
At least one critic took the bait. “What’s with the penis jokes, Craig? What are you? 12?,” Adam Buckman wrote in the pages of the New York Post. “You’re forty-freakin’-two years-old. What is your problem?”
The more sophomoric humor carries a bit into the interviews. Following a chat with actor David Duchovny, with whom he bonds over their shared Scottish heritage, Ferguson talks with Nicole Sullivan, at that time best known for her work on the sitcom, King of Queens. Earlier in the program, Ferguson teased that his first date in America was, in fact, with Sullivan. And that they (true story) had “made out.”
When Sullivan comes out for the interview, she leans into this fact, joking: “What if I just went right in, finished where we started.” To which Ferguson replies, “How was it?” She quickly responds, “I’ve had better.” Then adds, “it was a lovely kiss.”
It’s a funny moment. But throughout the interview, Ferguson again and again keeps returning to the kiss, seeming a bit lost.
Reviewers were generally not impressed with Ferguson’s debut. Writing for the New York Times on February 2, 2005, Alessandra Stanley described Ferguson’s Late Late Show as “not nearly as original and incisive as The Daily Show with Jon Stewart.” The problem, Stanley wrote, was that the show, co-created and helmed by longtime Carson and Letterman executive producer Peter Lassally, was too traditional. “Mr. Ferguson’s show is oddly staid,” Stanley wrote. “Actually, it’s a lot like the old Tonight show—too much so for him to ever become a Carson-like figure.”
In his native Britain, The Times ran an article with the headline, “Ferguson is TV turn off for US critics,” aggregating several of the less stellar reviews of his stateside debut.
Media analyst Larry Gerbrandt was more measured in his criticism. “But it is early days for Craig Ferguson and, at the end of the day, it won’t be the critics who determine his fate,” Gerbrandt said. “It will ultimately be the viewers who will vote with their remote controls.”
Find an audience he did. As NBC went from Leno to Conan and back again, Ferguson developed a cult following who came to love the show as he shaped it in his image. And he became a much better interviewer too, winning a Peabody Award in 2010 for his conversation with the Reverend Desmond Tutu. “Ferguson was not the best known of the late-night hosts,” Robert Lloyd wrote in the Los Angeles Times after the host’s final episode in 2014, “but he was the most singular and, for my money, the best, for his storytelling, curiosity, physicality and attraction to risk.”
In the decade since Ferguson went off the air, his show has continued to attract fans. “YouTube and the internet created a whole new repeat structure for old shows,” Ferguson said last year. “And I still get people coming to live shows who clearly never were old enough to watch me when I was doing the show, who say ‘I watch you on YouTube,’ like I’m someone who does a YouTube channel.”
Scroll the YouTube comments underneath clips from the show and the enduring devotion of fans new and old becomes clear. The YouTube channel, “Late Late Show w/ Craig Ferguson Archive,” currently has over 123k subscribers. “As a sufferer of chronic depression let me tell you,” one user wrote underneath the first episode of the show. “This show is life-saving medicine.”
WHY is he not on main stream television ? Craig is heads and shoulders above the current crop of late night shows!!