“Arrested Development” star Jeffrey Tambor showed up on last night’s “The Late Late Show With Craig Ferguson” as Batgirl in a The Brave and the Bold-style team-up with Craig Ferguson, dressed like Paul McCartney dressed like Jessica Fletcher (and acting like Craig Ferguson) in the 2010 remake of “Murder She Wrote.” I’m pretty sure the Lobster Dog is supposed to be in that picture, I’m just not great at photoshop.

Craig Ferguson is simultaneously making the most subversive and least challenging program in modern television. The show has always toed the line between Un Chien Andalou surrealism and Jason Mewes butthole farting, so explaining the gentle nature of this sketch would work to destroy it. Wait, no it wouldn’t, the explanation is “Craig Ferguson does random things, then laughs about it.” Watch:

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Craig Ferguson filmed this “Doctor Who”-themed cold open for the “Late Late Show” a month ago, but it never aired because it used the “Doctor Who” theme music, and British lawyers were all “Oi guvna, that’s right copyrigh’ed material, it is!” Or something to that effect. All I know for sure is that they had powdered wigs.

Anyway, Ferguson has confirmed that this cold open will air on Thursday’s show, so… that’s cool, I guess. I’m sorry, if there are two types of TV shows I’m slow to like, it’s sci-fi stuff and British shows. Put them together, and it’s almost a guarantee I’ll never watch it. Then tell me that I HAVE to watch it, and I never will. So just stuff it up George III’s skeleton butt next to the Stamp Tax, because I’ve got my hands full barely tolerating American geeks.

While most late-night talk shows are stuck in the same band-plays-over-announcer introduction that “The Tonight Show” has employed since the ’50s, Craig Ferguson begins every “Late Late Show” with a cold open, and all of the best ones involve dancing and puppets.

In last night’s episode, Ferguson donned an admiral’s uniform and a Flock of Seagulls wig, then lip-synced and danced to Modern English’s “Melt With You.” And he was joined by puppets Sid the Bunny and Wavy the Alligator, Jamie and Adam from “Mythbusters” (with Adam in a spacesuit), his robot sidekick, and background dancers dressed in All White Everything (video below).

Man, I wish I wasn’t too old and employed to spend all of my nights getting high and watching late-night television. This would have wrecked my mind.

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Craig Kilborn, who was once one of the ESPN’s best SportsCenter anchors before making a career out of hosting shows that his successors improved (Jon Stewart with “The Daily Show” and Craig Ferguson with “The Late Late Show”), will once again host a television show that may air as soon as this summer. The New York Times’s Media Decoder has the details:

[Kilborn] is about to return to television in a prospective  show for 20 TV, the syndication arm of Fox’s television stations.

The show in development would not be a late-night show, according to executives who are aware of the proposed deal. But a memo sent by the show’s producer seeking staff members described it as a combination of a talk show with a “nonpolitical ‘Daily Show.’ ”

The show is likely to get a trial run on Fox stations this summer… [Unlike Conan O'Brien's proposed show with Fox], a show with Mr. Kilborn will not be on the Fox network. It would instead run on the group of local stations owned by Fox. And the executives aware of the deal emphasized it was not intended to be a late-night show. It could potentially be a daytime entry, along the lines of similar syndicated entertainment shows like the one hosted by Ellen DeGeneres.

I dunno, I’m kind of done with Kilborn. I thought he was great on Sporstcenter, and I even liked the greasy charm of his “Five Questions” segment on the first iteration of “The Daily Show.” But seeing what Stewart and Ferguson have done in his wake, I’m perfectly content to not watch him host this show and see what the next guy does. It’s amazing what you can accomplish when you turn the “smarm” dial down a little.

Last night on “The Late Late Show,” Craig Ferguson finally debuted his robot skeleton sidekick, the result of a back-and-forth on Twitter with robotics expert Grant Imahara of “Mythbusters.”

“After joining ‘the Twitter’ in February, Ferguson nicknamed his followers on the social media platform ‘the Robot Skeleton Army’ and joked on ‘The Late Late Show’ that he needed a skeleton sidekick,” the network said in a news release. “In turn, Imahara, a former animatronics engineer and model maker known for his work on R2D2 and the Energizer Bunny, kicked off a campaign for the construction of a sidekick on March 1 with a tweet that read: ‘I hear you are looking for a robot sidekick. I think I can help… for a price: get me 100,000 followers. If you can.’” [UPI]

Dubbed Geoff Peterson, the robot makes a couple brief appearances in last night’s terrific cold open (see first video below), before getting its first real test drive during the monologue (second video). And it’s an outstanding monologue: most of the jokes are about hobos or deadly robots. Those are two of my favorite things to make fun of, because neither of them are human.

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