Late Night Raises The Burr

"Some nights I'll be doin' a bit, and I just really wish we could show the last night's show," Craig Ferguson, new host of CBS's "Late, Late Show," says of the hit-or-miss nature of the comedy sketches. (Kevin Winter -- Getty Images)

The show's comedy bits, TV critics have written since Ferguson took over, leave a lot to be desired. And he mostly agrees: "Did you see last night?" he asks, making a sour face. "Some nights I'll be doin' a bit, and I just really wish we could show the last night's show, but that's the whole [bleepin'] point of it. You have to make something every day.

"I had one guest," he says, declining to name her, "and I thought, 'God, even you are bored by what you're sayin'. You're bored, I'm bored.' She was so media-trained that it was like, 'Christ almighty, can't you forget this [expletive] for a minute?' "

Self-Taught Dropout

Ferguson was born in 1962 and came of age during the Protestant-Catholic tensions that raged in Ireland and set the tone in his Scottish neighborhood, too. The Fergusons were Protestant; his father worked for the postal service and his mother taught school; Craig is third of four children. He was a fat kid with too much energy. When he was 13, his father took him to Long Island to see an uncle; they got one of those budget fares on Sir Freddy Laker's airline. Ferguson was smitten with America.

He dropped out of high school at 15. "I was a bright kid, but I was kind of crazy. I used to win the school prize for literature. I would write these great big stories. But I never finished school and I kind of regret it now. I'll be reading something, Descartes or Thomas Aquinas" -- and he insists he really reads these things and was recently taken with Jostein Gaarder's "Sophie's World," a novel that attempts to encompass the whole history of Western philosophy -- "I'll be reading and come into something that's a huge [bleepin'] gap where I don't really know what's going on, and I'll have to go back and look up a reference from a thousand years earlier. On a good day I'm an autodidact and on a bad day I'm a dilettante." (He recently finished writing a novel about "the birth of a church in America," he says, but he hasn't shopped it around to publishers yet.) Eager "to just get started with life," Ferguson worked in a factory and as a bartender, and then joined a series of punk-rock bands in the late '70s and early '80s, "with such dooomb names," he notes: The Bastards From Hell, then the Green Boys. Then the Recognitions. Then the Lone Wolves. "The Lone Wolves? That's the dumbest name there," he says. "How can you be lone if you're a pack of wolves?"

In 1983, he and his first wife moved to New York, and Ferguson worked in construction and acted in some obscure plays. He returned to Scotland and to bartending, "I'm a big drinker. I'm an alcoholic, so I was good at bartending." He did profane stand-up comedy as a recurring character named Bing Hitler, which he now says he was too drunk to remember. He went into rehab in 1993 after appearing as Brad in a revival of "The Rocky Horror Show" and has been sober ever since.

That decision, he says, persuaded him to move to Los Angeles and try to break into TV (he joined Carey's sitcom in 1995) and movies. His last role, in "Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events," wound up mostly on the cutting-room floor; it was becoming apparent to him that the work was drying up, and Ferguson says he's given up acting.

He has frequently talked about his alcoholism since taking over "The Late, Late Show." When Steve Jones, the former Sex Pistol turned L.A. radio deejay, came on the show, he and Ferguson commiserated like a couple of veterans of the punk-rock pint wars.

'Can He Do It?'

Johnny Carson died when Ferguson had been on the job only two weeks. He felt extremely awkward about weaving Carson's death into his own mess of a show. He worried that nothing he could say seemed appropriate, or even earned.

But without rehearsal or a script, Ferguson opened his show with some gentlemanly words. "I think if I had done some big phony thing about Johnny, I would have been found out. I said, we're going to talk about it once, because he created what we do for a living, and then we're going to leave it."

He quoted James Joyce and told about moving to New York at 22, and feeling naive and far from home. He said that he felt "a little bit more American" each night when he watched "The Tonight Show."

Now that Ferguson has buzz -- and his publicists are running a charm offensive that has him hosting awards shows and doing more interviews -- the feeling around CBS is that they picked a nice guy.

But as it happens, Ferguson needs to be a tyrant right this very minute. After a blackened chicken wrap and a meeting with his writers, he has to go to the set and play the part of North Korea's Kim Jong Il in a prerecorded skit for the night's show where Fearless Leader makes a nuclear bid for the 2012 Olympics.

The sketch feels doomed from the start -- when Ferguson walks out in a Kim Jong Il hairdo, someone on the crew says he looks "like Ira from 'Mad About You' " -- but Ferguson is happily game, ready to bomb.

"I think I was anxious at first about failing, but not now. It's still too early to tell," he says. His contract with CBS is for six years, but that could mean nothing. "I think anyone who reviewed the show in the first three weeks, and a lot of people did, is kind of an idiot. None of us know what it is, and I think maybe that's why people are watching. They're sort of fascinated, I think. 'Can he do it'?

"The final answer," he says, "is I will be here for a while, and I will get it right."