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.”
