Replies

Fire up the VCR; set your TiVo!
ANN COULTER on "Late, Late Show with Craig Ferguson" MONDAY (5/23)
Here are a few SHORT EXCERPTS about the new "Late, Late Show" host Craig Ferguson, from www.washingtonpost.com:

Late Night Raises The Burr
CBS's Craig Ferguson Brings Brit Wit -- and a Spot of Tea -- to the Table
By Hank Stuever
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, March 14, 2005; Page C01

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...
-- snip --
...you might want to use your fake Scottish accent (and you know you've got one) for the quotes where Ferguson talks. Just do it in your worst burr; think Groundskeeper Willie on "The Simpsons," James "Scotty" Doohan from "Star Trek" or Mike Myers as Fat Bastard. Such is the American pop gamut of Scots, until now....
-- snip --
...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.
Desperate actresses especially adore him. Witness the parade of fabulously coiffed and giddy B-minusers who've done "The Late, Late Show With Craig Ferguson" since its debut Jan. 3 -- Jennifer Beals, Mimi Rogers, Jennifer Love Hewitt...
-- snip --
Dunaway is on to promote "Starlet," the new reality show she's appearing on, but also she is here, she will later reveal, because she's been staying up late, too, with the rest of a certain demographic: People who, perhaps through a fog of Tylenol PM, have developed a teensy, weird crush on Ferguson.
The show has become very Los Angeles in a local sense, in both vibe and casual conversation -- as if West Hollywood had gained a cable-access channel. Ferguson talks about his ex-wife (they are friendly; she runs a Pilates center and lives two doors from his house, and went with him to Clive Davis's Grammy party) and his 4-year-old son, Milo (he shares custody). Watching the shoo feels like you've bumped into him at the Farmers' Market Starbucks off Fairfax Avenue...
-- snip --
...He addresses viewers at home as "my lovelies" or, better, calls them "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. The show leaps at you -- at 12:35 a.m., an ungodly hour for anyone past their Jesus year, age 33 -- with a jaunty, Electric Light Orchestra-ish theme song...
-- snip --
...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 tailored suit and expensive necktie sitting at a desk with a fake window view of twinkling lights behind him, 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 says. "There were no trial shows -- this is it, so the comedy is honest-to-goodness birth pains."
CBS really just threw this man 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..."