By his own admission, Craig Ferguson isn’t globally famous. The stand-up comic and former chat show host is known in his native Scotland. Ish. And he reckons London taxi drivers might recognise him, if they’re a bit long in the tooth. But otherwise? Nada. “I kind of stumbled through,” he recalls, of his boozy UK years of late-Eighties stand-up and aborted TV pilots. “But I never particularly got anything going until I went to America.”
Ferguson’s comic register is dark-hued, bawdy and lightly surreal in the way of so many to come of age watching Monty Python. It should have made him a star here. So it was strange when, in 1994 and after years of fruitless hustle, it was America that proved most receptive to it. Today, the 63-year-old lives there, and tours, and hosts game shows. He’s an amateur anthropologist with a side hustle in history-themed documentaries and podcasts, and – most notably – spent 2005 until 2014 as the smart, solicitous Scotsman lulling TV viewers to sleep as the host of a late night chat show (co-hosted by a robot skeleton). Before James Corden was drafted in to replace him, he made everyone from Billy Connolly and Robin Williams to Julia Louis-Dreyfus and Sandra Bullock erupt in giggles. Now he’s back on home turf, performing in London and Glasgow for the first time in decades. And for the first time without a drink in his hand. “I’ve been sober for 34 years,” he says. “But I’m not going to deny that it’s a little bit frightening.”
The performing, he adds. Not so much the being there – he got over the fear of wandering into old haunts years ago. “I must have been seven or eight years sober and back in London, and I had to go for a business lunch at a, err, notorious club – you can probably guess which one,” he grins. “And I saw a guy in there that I used to buy cocaine from. Part of being sober is you gotta put it all f***ing back, so I say, ‘I don’t know if you remember me, but I’m sober now and I think I owe you £60’.” The guy remembered him and, yes, he did indeed owe him. Ferguson paid up, only for the gentleman in question to empty his pockets and offer him yet another baggie. Ferguson cracks up. “I demurred, but it’s always nice to know your credit’s still good.”
Ferguson is video calling from his adoptive home of New England, where he lives with his wife Megan, an art dealer, and his 15-year-old son (he has a 25-year-old son from a previous marriage). “We’re up here looking at snow and eating deviled eggs, because that’s what Yankees eat,” he jokes. Ferguson always loved America. He watched astronauts on live television as a child, and listened intently to the Little Richard records his Aunty Betty played for him. It felt so big. “I’m a very satisfied customer of American cultural imperialism,” he adds. But later, after years of drugs and alcohol, America also provided a clean slate for him.
“I had f***ed up by my own hand, and America – certainly professionally – meant a fresh start,” he remembers. “America didn’t care that I’d f***ed up. But the American approach to f***ing up is also very different to anywhere else I’ve come across. Here failure is just a thing.” He shrugs. “You swung, you missed. Go again. There’s no shame in it. And I found that was like a warm bath to me back then.” Was he ever wounded that, despite his best efforts, he never really made it in London? “Yeah, at the time,” he says. “Because I totally failed in England, and that was massively disappointing.” He grins. “But I’ve failed so many times since that the disappointment’s worn off.”
Everything you’re angry about – and that’s regardless of your political stripe – will still be there two hours later once you leave the theatre. My job, then, is to give you a break
Ferguson is craggily handsome, with salt and pepper hair and a roguish laugh like Muttley’s. And he’s also funny, speaking with a quick, louche disaffectedness that reads a little terse written down but which I promise is actually highly charismatic in person. On his old talk show, Ferguson was famous for literally ripping up his cue cards as soon as his guests arrived, before spending 20 minutes or so riffing with them about quite literally anything but the project they were intended to promote. The conversation would always spin sideways – he asked Archbishop Desmond Tutu if he can only move diagonally, warmly received Carrie Fisher’s gift of a pair of taxidermied kangaroo testicles, and was so distracted by Claire Danes’s off-hand mention of her philosopher father-in-law that he invited him to appear on the show the following week.
There’s a touch of the same energy to our chat, with Ferguson veering off into piano metaphors and his admiration for baseball, and his dalliances in UK TV at the top of the Nineties. “I did a pilot for Granada, and the head of ITV said, ‘When Craig Ferguson got sober, he stopped being funny’”. Ferguson was furious at the time. “What a bastard! But, actually, I think for a couple of years, he was probably right.”
Ferguson’s Late Late Show ran for 10 years, before the US network CBS replaced him with James Corden, who took the format in a very different direction: gone was the meandering chat, and in its place were pre-planned anecdotes, games and “bits”, like the briefly inescapable Carpool Karaoke. And it’s a structure that’s had greater legs than the rambling improvisation of Ferguson’s reign, evident today in everything from The Graham Norton Show to Claudia Winkleman’s new, divisive chat show. “I feel like I’m uniquely unqualified to talk about late night television,” Ferguson says. “I didn’t really watch it before I did it, I didn’t watch it while I was doing it, and I had no f***ing interest in watching it after I did it.” But he knows that people loved the show all the same. “I’m proud of it. We did a good job. I’m glad I don’t do it anymore.”
It’s partly down to how much work it involved, he says. And he thinks the sheer volume of comedy material required is why US talk shows have become increasingly political in recent years – the monologues at the start of each nightly episode, whether performed by Jimmy Kimmel or Stephen Colbert, will now inevitably cycle back to MAGA. “The great thing about politics is that there’s always something happening, so that means there’s something to talk about,” he says. “And that’s useful if you have to fill an hour of television every day. But I don’t have to do that now.”
On that note, his stand-up tour won’t be political. “And what’s interesting is that everyone assumes that means you’re on the side of the person they hate,” he laughs. (He’s a Vermont voter and a Bernie Sanders fan, so Ferguson’s politics are semi-visible if you care to look.) He started depoliticising his comedy as an experiment, then realised he dug it. “It forces you into anecdotal work, and more personal material, which works for me. And it creates an atmosphere in these shows where everything you’re angry about – and that’s regardless of your political stripe – will still be there two hours later once you leave the theatre. My job, then, is to give you a break.”
But, of course, he inherently is political, or at least can be. One of the most famous incidents on The Late Late Show occurred in 2007, the Monday after Britney Spears shaved her hair off while in the midst of a very public breakdown. During his monologue, Ferguson expressed his discomfort with the media climate of the time, and the constant jokes made at Spears’ expense. “Comedy should have a certain amount of joy in it,” he said then. “It should be about us attacking the powerful people … We shouldn’t be attacking the vulnerable people. [Britney] has two kids, she’s 25 years old – she’s a baby herself.”
“I remember coming to work that day quite angry,” he says now. “I knew I was going to be asked to be complicit in this f***ing pile-on. So that monologue was like a little ‘f*** you’. Because I’d had enough, and every now and then you do have to say ‘f*** this’. It was probably the most punk rock thing we did on the show.”
It remains Ferguson to a tee – thoughtful, funny, and always a tiny bit anarchic.
“Not everybody was crazy about it at the time, of course,” he adds. “There were a few kind of… ‘Who do you think you are, you pompous c***?’”
He giggles.
“But f*** ‘em.”
‘Craig Ferguson: Pants on Fire’ is in London on April 24 and Glasgow on April 26, with tickets available here
