The Late Late Show is produced by World Wide Pants and created by David Letterman for Tom Snyder. Craig Ferguson becomes the new host after Craig Kilborn left. Ferguson is best-known for his work on the comedy series "The Drew Carey Show" where he played Carey's boss, Nigel Wick. The multi-talented entertainer also wrote and starred in the feature films, "Saving Grace" and "The Big Tease." He also spent some time behind the camera making his directorial debut in 2003 with the critically acclaimed film "I'll Be There," which took home Audience Awards for Best Film at the Aspen, Dallas and Valencia Film Festivals.
The opening of the show is very short, and usually doesn't include the theme song and immediately zooms in on Craig Ferguson, who is already standing on the stage. The entire opening has been aired after many months of an extremely short opening and has been featuring the full opening theme after returning from repeat episodes. New episodes have aired since January 2008.
One of Craig Ferguson's talents is the ability to improvise. He has a few topics in the beginning of the show where he stands on the stage in front of the audience making up additional statements as he talks about the original topics. After the Shadow Stephens mentions the sponsor, the show returns from commercials. Nearly each time the show resumes from commercials, he says "Welcome back! Welcome back my naughty monkeys..." or "filthy pigeons" "frisky badgers" or donkeys, or ponies, or some kind of other animal. He either imitates the animal or uses a series of sound effects from a sound board. He answers Emails sent to him. They are printed out, he says who and where they are from. Then he briefly shows the paper to everybody and resumes reading the message. There are other segments, such as where he is writing a letter with a giant quill, impersonating somebody else, or pretending to interview somebody famous but it is just somebody that looks like them. There are a few differences with this series compared to other late night talk shows. There are only two chairs and they are seldom used. Somebody emailed him mentioning that the chair on the left is almost always empty and asked Craig if he rotates the chairs so they wear evenly. When he is interviewing the guests, he moves over next to them similar to if the desk wasn't even there.
The Late Late Show airs Monday-Friday at 12:35am EST on CBS.
Theme song:
It's hard to stay up
It's been a long, long day
And you got the Sandman at the door
But hang on, leave the TV on
And let's do it anyway
It's okay
You could always sleep through work tomorrow, okay?
Hey hey
Tomorrow's just your future yesterday...
Listen to the Theme Song here. (At bottom right of page).
USA)