Craig Ferguson tells Howard Stern About His Show + Leaving Late Night

Craig Ferguson moved from late-night TV to drive-time radio — and he’s loving the lack of limits here at SiriusXM.

“I never wanted to do a daily show again, and then my wife’s like, ‘You gotta do something. You can’t sit around the house all day,'” Ferguson said Tuesday on The Howard Stern Show.

And the Scottish comic was thrilled to learn he could broadcast from a studio built in the shed in his garden (sometimes wearing pants, sometimes not so much).

“I kind of like it because you really don’t have anyone to answer to, so far,” he explained. “They haven’t said to me, ‘You need to have this guest’ or ‘you need to have that guest.’”

“No, you don’t get any feedback around here,” Stern quipped.

“Yeah, it’s fun. It’s kind of weird. I’m still a little institutionalized in the sense that I feel like I have to book people I’ve heard of,” Ferguson said.

Though he’s chatted with megastars like Scarlett Johansson and Seth Meyers, one upcoming booking isn’t exactly A-list: his dentist.

“He’s funny!” Ferguson insisted to Stern’s amusement. “He’s a very interesting guy. He was Frank Sinatra’s dentist.”

Ferguson also reflected on his nine years hosting The Late Late Show. He left in 2014 amid rumors he might take his legendary boss David Letterman’s seat in the earlier time slot. (Stephen Colbert got the CBS gig.)

“I had a feeling you were kind of saying, ‘hm,'” Stern said. “I don’t know if you wanted Letterman’s job or not. From every indication, I’ve heard you didn’t want it.”

 

Agreeing he had a “great run” behind the desk, Ferguson said he doesn’t regret leaving television.

“I didn’t want it. But I guess when it started to circle, you start to think, ‘Are they going to ask me to do it?’ Because you don’t want to go to the party, but you kind of want to be asked to the party,” he said with a laugh. “But I also realized that I was in a dangerous situation. What happened is this: I had been doing the show for a long time. So, you know this, you stay on the air a long time, they have to give you a pay raise every couple of years, so now I’m expensive.”

The Craig Ferguson Show airs weekdays from 6-8 pm ET on SiriusXM Comedy Greats (Ch. 94).