Between the Bridge and the River by Craig Ferguson Read Free Book Online

panicked.
    “Fraser, are you drunk?”
    “Not yet. Why?”
    “Get back to the studios. Morris has just had a heart attack, he’s been carried off in an ambulance.”
    “Jesus, okay. I’ll be right over.”
    “Fraser, not a word of this to those fucking hyenas in there.”
    “Of course, Gus, of course.”
    Fraser hung up and announced to the entire bar that he had to go because Old Morris had had a heart attack and had been carried off in an ambulance.
    The hyenas who were sober enough rushed to file copy. Morris Cuskerton had been an institution in Scotland for decades. He presented a variety show called
The Three O’Clock Gang
on Scottish TV in the fifties, then news, then a talk show where he interviewed local celebs and the occasional movie star who was passing through on the way to St Andrews for the golf. He was Scotland’s Ed Sullivan, Johnny Carson, and Dick Clark rolled into one. Real old-timey television. For the past ten years he had been farmed out to the late-night religious spot, which was meant to be a bridge to retirement, but it became popular because it was live (Morris insisted on working live—it was the only way to do TV, he said, like the old days) and he occasionally would make fantastic blunders or be tipsy as he delivered his “Thoughts for the Day.” On one memorable occasion he made a reference to the Virgin Mabel. People loved this shit, and the Christmas Eve broadcast was the most popular because he would almost certainly be hammered and make a complete tit of himself. All of the country would be watching except the Diogenes club in the Press Bar, who had no festive spirit.
    Fraser was being called to fill in for Morris. This was the call to glory. Sink or swim, live or die. Live TV, no script, no net.
    Fraser, the charmed, the lucky boy, was in the right place at the right time with just the right amount of alcohol in his system. He was relaxed, sexy, and confident, so when the word came through, only seconds before Fraser went on air, that Old Morris had died on arrival at the hospital, he took command and broke the tragic news to a shocked nation.
    He was magnificent, he spoke with reverence and just the right amount of sadness. He recalled Morris’s glittering career on ScottishTelevision, remembering shows that even Gus had forgotten, like
Cartoon Company,
which Morris had hosted in the sixties, a cheap throw-together using Hollywood animated shorts like Tom and Jerry or Woody Woodpecker, where Morris pretended he knew the cartoon characters and “talked” to them on the phone even though they were in America.
    He would put his hand over the receiver and say, “Daffy Duck wants to wish Stewart MacDougal of Falkirk a happy eighth birthday and a big hello to his Grandpa Sneddon.”
    Fraser talked of Morris’s love of the Glasgow Rangers Football Club, and steered clear of the dead man’s reputed fanatical allegiance to the bigoted and medieval Orange Lodge, a band of über-Protestants who had a very confused allegiance to William of Orange, a noted pederast and Dutch monarch who had successfully suppressed Catholics some hundreds of years previously. He talked of Morris’s charm, his wit, and hinted at his fondness for strong alcoholic beverages (which is seen as a great character asset in Scotland). And then, the stroke of genius.
    He finished with—
    “—so as we are hanging up our stockings tonight and leaving carrots and whisky out for Santa and his reindeer, Morris Cuskerton will be arriving at the pearly gates. A Christmas present for heaven.”
    A grieving country was grateful for his words.
    Fraser had landed the God spot. The G spot.
    It was about this time that the late Carl Gustav Jung started working with Fraser. Jung, of course, had died in 1961, which was the year before Fraser was born, so the conditions under which they met were slightly unconventional, but as Fraser had never had any form of treatment before, he had nothing to compare it to. It seemed