Craig Ferguson slags off hometown in US interview

TV host and comedian Craig Ferguson took the opportunity during an interview with the Wall Street Journal to slag off his home town of Cumbernauld.
Craig Ferguson filming at Cumbernauld High back in 2012Craig Ferguson filming at Cumbernauld High back in 2012
Craig Ferguson filming at Cumbernauld High back in 2012

Ferguson (56) is currently promoting his new book, Riding the Elephant: A Memoir of Altercations, Observations and Humiliations.

This features a series of reflections on his time as a comic and a drummer in Scotland, a bouncer in New York, stints on American TV shows, as well as his battles with sobriety and attempts to take his own life.

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In the interview it appears that 25 years after leaving The UK for America he still holds scorn towards Cumbernauld.

Ferguson told the WSJ: “I was always eager to escape my hometown. One day when I was three, my mother was washing clothes and I wandered off. She later said she found me at the footbridge over the freeway singing to cars speeding by.

“I grew up in Cumbernauld, a town developed in the 1950s about 15 minutes from Glasgow. It was a community of the future, a modernist experiment conceived by planners who didn’t have a clue.

“Houses in our rainy region foolishly had flat roofs. Roadways were absurdly wide. The town’s designers expected everyone to drive to work and return home all at once.

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“The concrete used to build the miles of identical homes was lousy and there were no stores or restaurants. The town offered affordable, soulless housing for ground-down workers.

“Our house was similar to all the others. It looked like the concrete machine-gun turrets the Germans installed on the Normandy coast during World War II, but much closer together, with welcome mats.”

This isn’t the first time Ferguson has slagged off Cumbernauld having been branded a “traitor” back in 2012 by then Campsies Centre chairman Gerry McElroy.

This came after he told viewers of the Late Late Show his hometown was “a pretty terrible place” and in a conversation with author Jon Ronson sniped: “There’s only one problem in Scotland: Cumbernauld.”

Ferguson will be back in Scotland this summer when he brings his new stand-up show Hobo Fabulous to the Edinburgh Playhouse in August.