A rather short-lived, completely wacky and much beloved institution of late, late night TV has come to an end. Secretariat will go out to pasture, Geoff Peterson the Robot Sidekick will go into storage, and the best late show on TV will go dark as Craig Ferguson kicks in his fireplace set on The Late Late Show and moves on with his career.
Craig’s show was always a strange, heady mix of self deprecation, rapid-fire jokes and broad comedy (two guys in a horse costume smashing through plate glass, anyone?) and though it may have had the lowest budget around (our host would have us believe it was financed mostly through the change in CBS execs’ pockets), it had the best entertainment value from a late show that anyone can ask for. And yes, that includes you, Giggles Fallon.
Craig on his own is incredibly, dangerously funny. His stand-up acts are wonderful and bless him, unless it’s because he’s not saving his money, Craig is goodly enough to take that act on the road to all kinds of weird little places that most A-listers wouldn’t event admit exist. He is often ably assisted by the human behind the robot, Josh Robert Thompson, whose Morgan Freeman impression is so dead-on he is actually allowed to substitute for Morgan Freeman in voice work.
My husband often joked that he would find me in bed with my “boyfriend” - the slightly rakish, barely-reformed, Scottish-accented bad boy of late night TV. Craig is handsome and affable and very laid back, which certainly added to the vibe of his show, as well as his relaxed and improvised chat with guests. His greatest achievement was making the whole show into a huge, running standup act that continued to snowball into the most consistently hilarious hour of television available in this milieu. When you see a stand up, the good ones tell jokes that loop around, connect to each other, and get a bit funnier when referenced again through the course of the act. Craig has been doing that for 10 years as host of the Late Late Show. The layers he built into his show just kept piling on, and rewarded his loyal audience with a stream of inside jokes that just kept being funnier every time you heard them.
Whether you believe the hype that he was passed over for Letterman’s chair or not, Craig’s show certainly couldn’t have a home on even the later edges of primetime. A bit raw, definitely unpredictable, and occasionally punctuated with (carefully bleeped) profanity, it is the stuff of TV executive nightmares.
But it was the stuff of the sweetest dreams, too. Happy semi-retirement, Mr. Ferguson.
Image screengrab CBS.com
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