Associated Press
Madonna, now richer due to court ruling, shown on Letterman show last Wednersday.
Tattle: Letterman's woes spell big numbers for the show
IF STARLET wannabes can gain fame by making sex tapes and average joes can become famous surviving in the jungle or dropping 200 pounds, should it surprise anyone that David Letterman's ratings would go up following sexual indiscretions?
If this keeps up, NBC may have to force Conan to do something tawdry. The Nielsen Co.'s overnight- large-markets measurements - not the measurements that got Dave's attention - netted Dave's Monday night "Late Show" on CBS a 4.2 rating - higher than anything rival NBC had in prime-time - which actually says more about NBC than it does about Dave.
Nielsen didn't yet have an estimate of the size of Dave's audience. The overnight rating was slightly less than last Thursday's, when 5.8 million people watched Letterman's mea culpa numero uno, saying he had been the victim of a $2 million blackmail threat that led him to reveal that he had had sex with staff members.
As he mixed wisecracks with contrition on Monday's show, Dave said that his wife, Regina Lasko, had been "horribly hurt by my behavior."
(She waits 20 years to marry you and then this?)
Dave also stated flat-out that those affairs "are in the past."
Well, those affairs are in the past.
* Struggling with finding a comedic angle on Dave's dalliances is "Late Late Show" host Craig Ferguson.
Dave is Craig's boss.
And you can't make sex jokes about the boss unless you have steel-enforced gonads or really crave unemployment.
"The person you work for, the person you admire and respect, is caught in an embarrassing situation," Ferguson said on his own show Monday night. "And your job is to be funny about that, whilst trying to keep your own job."
"So this is my last show," he joked.
But Ferguson, a naturally funny, stream-of-consciousness riffer, couldn't help but offer up a punchline, teasing that it had now been revealed how he had gotten his own job with Dave.
He also defended Letterman, calling him "the king of late-night television."
"If we are now holding late-night talk-show hosts to the same moral accountability as we hold politicians or clergymen, I'm out," said Ferguson, a recovering alcoholic. "I'm gone."
Craig, if we hold late-night talk-show hosts to the same moral accountability as we hold politicians or clergymen . . . you have nothing to worry about.
Tattbits
* Roman Polanski lost the first round yesterday in his battle to avoid extradition to the United States for having sex in 1977 with a 13-year-old girl.
Locked in a Zurich cell for the last dozen days, Polanski learned that he will remain incarcerated for an extended period.
Swiss authorities expressed fear he might flee the country if freed from prison.
