Craig Ferguson is a genius. He does that show every night, after creepy, unpleasant, unamusing and generally horrible Letterman has finished, starting with a brand new long (for talk TV) routine that is all three of funny, genuinely observed and written by himself (unless his scriptwriters also grew up in 70s Glasgow, which seems unlikely), and then introducing all sorts of unimpressive people you have never heard of and making them seem interesting. Last night, for instance, there was a magician. Not one of these new-fangled magicians who walks through the Great Wall of China while invisible then turns it into the Tour Eiffel- this magician did the three-cups-and-a-ball-inside trick. Only. For hours. To a cheesy Gregorian monk rock tape.

But you don’t care, because Craig Ferguson is so good the guests are irrelevant. He tells stories about his real life that make you laugh just because he’s telling them so well, and they don’t have stupid punch lines with drums. Last night we got more of his childhood- I hate snowballs, when I was at school the kids used to put stones in them- it’s true! If we couldn’t find nails, we’d use stones! (The kids at my school did that too). The 1978 “winter of discontent” when everyone was on strike, we used to light candles- not those lavendar aromatherapy Kabbalah candles- we huddled around them to keep warm! (I remember that too). And the weather: It was quite chilly here in LA this morning! I had to put on two tank tops when I went to get my frappuccino! And my frappuccino stayed frozen for slightly longer than usual! You would think living somewhere cold for years and years would make you hardy forever. You’d be wrong. When I go back to Scotland now, I sit indoors, crying. “Why do you people put up with this? And who do you have to kill to get a latte round here?”

Yes, I strongly identify with all of that, but also Craig Ferguson is just funny. He hasn’t dumped his accent a la Catherine Zeta-Jones, forcing LA and America (or the small part that watches his show) to get used to it instead; I don’t know if I’ve ever mentioned this before, but I’m not originally from LA. But tragically, Ferguson can’t get promoted until Letterman dies, and by then all his material will be used up. Ferguson clearly understands the injustice of this, but is luckily no longer a practising alcoholic, as he mentions all the time, so hopefully the Van Gogh/ Gaugin complex won’t get out of hand.

I decided the nauseating thing about Van Gogh is that greenish kind of yellow he uses all the time. Yellow is fine, yellow is sunshine, but sunshine doesn’t have green in it. Van Gogh seems to want the sun to emanate from the ground upwards rather than shining from above, which would explain the green, but the result is the only colour I know that actually has the power to make you feel ill. There’s no such thing as an inherently nauseating red or blue. End post.