10.28.09 THE LIGHTS WENT OUT ON CRAIG FERGUSON – UPDATE
If you follow an Angeleno on Twitter, you know that L.A. had some crazy high winds yesterday (up to 70 mph). And it affected Craig Ferguson’s taping of “The Late Late Show” when the winds knocked out power at CBS Television City.
Show publicist Katie Barker says lights started dimming and then suddenly went black about 5:45 p.m. as Ferguson was interviewing actress Alicia Silverstone, leaving both in the dark as to what was going on. Producers decided to keep the blackout as part of the show and handed Ferguson a flashlight. [Variety]
The clip of Silverstone’s interview is below, and the power goes out at the end of the video just before Ferguson goes to commercial. Before that, it’s a whole lot of Ferguson doing an amazing job of making great television out of Silverstone’s boring-ass diet book. He really is a tremendous host, and I’d watch the show more, but… it’s CBS. “NCIS” is the number one TV show in the country. I kind of take that personally.
UPDATE: I added the clip of Ferguson using a flashlight at the end of the show.


Someone at another site I can’t remember made a good point – why didn’t the cameras and microphones go dead as well? Are they running on a generator? If so, why wouldn’t the lights be on that generator as well? Conan was able to broadcast during the NY power outage a few years ago because they hooked up the cameras to a generator, which wasn’t powerful enough to use on the lights. Does Ferguson simply keep the cameras on a generator backup at all times? Weird. Although even if it was a hoax, I don’t care because Ferguson is awesome.