Late Night TV

I  probably should have written a blog about this topic long ago, but now is as good a time as any. We usually go to bed at 11:00pm  or earlier each night. Barbie and Kozmo will usually head to bed first and I will follow later, sometimes after I watch the 11:00 news. But, during the course of each weekday evening I’ll usually check the DirecTV guide to see which guests are on the late night talk shows. If there are some interesting guests I’ll DVR them so we can check them out the next day. At 11:30, it’s usually “The Late Show” with David Letterman. Every once in a while it may be “The Tonight Show” with Jay Leno. But at 12:35am, the ONLY show I’ve DVRed is “The Late Late Show” with Craig Ferguson. I got hooked on Ferguson only about a year ago when my back was shot and I spent my nights sleeping in my recliner chair and couldn’t sleep well at all because of the meds or whatever. He is a Scottish–American television host, stand-up comedian, writer, actor, director, and producer. He took over “The Late Late Show” from Craig Wilborn in January 2005. The guy is hilarious. He has no co-host, no band but he has a talking “skeleton” machine, Geoff Peterson.

   Geoff Petersen

Geoff’s debut appearance was on Monday, April 5, 2010. Geoff Peterson was designed and built by Grant Imahara of the Discovery Channel show Mythbusters. He has neon blue eyes, a metal mohawk and wears an over-sized suit with his name scrawled on a contestant's name tag from The Price is Right. The robot is voiced by Josh Thompson, either live or as a set of pre-recorded phrases. Geoff makes comments regularly that contribute to the comedy of the show. There are “other” regulars such as “Secretariat”, a horse (2 humans in a horse costume) that dances out on stage for a brief appearance as Ferguson and the audience “dance” in the background. Occasionally, a white rabbit puppet manned by Ferguson, does the shows opening. Each guest’s segment ends one of 3 ways: 1) the guest may choose to play a “mouth organ”(harmonica) with Ferguson, 2) the guest my choose to have “an awkward pause” with Ferguson and most recently added, 3) the guest may choose to hold Ferguson’s “glittery ball”, which is a miniature mirrored disco ball. Needless to say, the show is filled with many sexual innuendos. I’m smiling or laughing the entire hour. If you’ve never checked it out, you really should…it is different.

What prompted this blog was that last night on Letterman’s Show he brought Regis Philbin to serve as his first ever co-host on “The Late Show.” The two of them together was hilarious. It was an awesome show. Ferguson followed with guest Julie Chen. I can tell you that we spent two great hours watching those show today.

Well, so much for late night tv.

‘Til next time……..