Megan thinks that I tend to go for the joke rather than the truth in a conversation.
-That's because I'm afraid of her. -Not true.
My name is Craig Ferguson. I'm a stand-up comedian, actor, writer and talk show host.
Darling?
I'm also the husband of a very beautiful and clever woman called Megan Ferguson.
She is my best friend and the love of my life.
But we don't agree on everything. I sometimes wonder if we agree on anything.
-You don't say, "That guy's a..." -"Psychopathy"?
Well, you don't say, "He's a psycho-path."
Thirteen years ago we started a conversation, and it has never stopped.
-I think you're wrong. -No.
Sometimes it stops for a bit, for sleeping.
In this programme, we try really hard to get new perspectives on our discussions.
Food is the new Internet. You'll make plenty of money.
-The universe is alive within us. -This is magical!
We get the facts straight from the horse's mouth.
And by "horse's mouth", I mean expert. Not an actual horse...obviously.
Smile for this lady.
She's not taping us. It was the statue.
I like when people see a camera and crouch and run.
They think it makes them invisible. You're not Harry Potter.
We're on vacation. Nothing better than hanging around fjords and stuff.
I can't remember what side of the street to drive on.
-Do you know what it should always be? -Turn right on Otto Sverdrups gate.
I'm not turning right on Plump's gate.
-Turn right on Otto Sverdrups gate. -Shut up!
This woman is very chatty. I don't like her. She's bossy and English.
Do you think the English...?
"My! You've done rather well for a Scot."
"What's a Scot doing in an expensive rental car?"
"Exactly! On holidays, are you?"
It's a fact of life. Take the wrong turn, and your life can change immediately.
Do you know who's a perfect example? Jo Nesbo.
I wanted to meet Jo Nesbo again.
I had him on the late-night show and I liked him.
He's had a lot of different turns in his life.
It's really out here.
So I want to talk to him about that.
It's very small.
-Are you sure this is it? -It looks cosy to me. I think it's it.
-OK. -Adorable.
-It's kind of nice. -All right, well...
Do you think there'll be a troll?
"Before you can meet Jo Nesbo, you must answer the questions three."
Do you live here? Does everyone in Norway have one of these?
We all have one of these. We get these when we're born.
Come here! We have questions. Come down!
Jo Nesbo. Jo is a best-selling author
known for the Harry Hole detective crime novels.
Nesbo has sold 36 million copies of his novels worldwide,
but life wasn't always like this.
He was a soccer player in Norway's premier league.
Then he was a financial analyst by day,
and by night, he was a chart-topping rock star.
Nesbo can tell us a thing or two about having the guts to leave
the perceived paved road of life and career.
Is it all about the pursuit of happiness?
Here's what I want to ask.
Anyone who knows you, particularly in America,
thinks of you as a writer of crime stories.
But that is clearly not what you set out to be.
Was it something you wanted to be? Is it free will?
Or was it a decision...? "I'm not happy."
"I want to follow my dream and be a crime writer." What was it?
I think it's hard to analyse your own decisions.
But when I look at my own life and the lives of my friends,
I think there's a mix.
But I do think, looking back, that I was on my way to writing something.
Not necessarily a crime novel.
I ended up with a crime novel, that was partly coincidental.
But the fact that I'm writing would have happened no matter what.
That was something you couldn't not do? It had to come out?
Yeah. When I grew up, there were books everywhere. My mother was a librarian.
I would read from when I was very young, and I would write poems.
Maybe it's not a coincidence that I ended up writing crime novels.
In school we had to write essays with lame titles like "A nice day in the woods".
And I would write it - only in my essay, nobody would come back alive.
So maybe I was headed for the crime novel.
It's a funny thing, though, that if you write about crime...
Do you find yourself getting depressed? Does it cheer you up to get it out of you?
Oh well, it's... It's a little bit of both.
When you stay in that universe of my protagonist Harry Hole...
I wouldn't say it's depressing, but it's tiring.
But then again, I wouldn't compare it to working in dark places.
If you work down in the dark cellar of psychiatry or in a prison,
or even for the police, you can't really leave.
Those are real people you are working with.
I can leave. I can shut the door to that universe and have a normal life.
I don't have nightmares about my protagonist or my characters.
-You dip in and out. -I wouldn't exaggerate the toll it takes...
...to write about dark stuff, but I do get tired.
And it is bizarre to wake up and have an idea for something really gruesome,
and you go like, "Yeah!"
Think about it though... If you take the wrong turn at any point in your life,
it's like "Sliding Doors".
If I had not seen that movie, I would have been much happier.
That's a crap movie, but it makes an interesting point.
One change, and your life could be completely different.
True. What would have happened if you had not done your first stand-up routine?
You were just in Cumbernauld.
What about alternative universes? An alternate reality where we never meet?
That would be so awful. You and I met because I went to a party.
My great-grandmother said, "Go to the party. You never know who you'll meet."
And I met you. If I hadn't gone to the party, I wouldn't have the boys or you.
It would be very sad.
When we met, that was kind of decisive. We met at this party.
Megan was there with her French boyfriend, who was very swanky.
We were talking for a bit, and I said, "Let's get out of here and hit the town."
She said, "I'm here with my boyfriend." "What?! Where is he?"
"On the other side of the room."
"If you were my girlfriend,"
"you would not be on the other side of the room talking to a man like me."
-I was like, "Oh... Got me." -You're welcome, kids. Try it yourselves.
-Did you see that bus? -That was a bit intense.
Norwegian bus driver... "I never wanted this. I wanted to write crime novels!"
I wonder... I experienced when I was a kid...
I come from a respectable background. I think you do, too.
Your mother was a librarian and your father was a banker of some kind.
So even if you believe that you want to work in the arts,
you suppress any dream you have of that kind of life.
You were in a successful band and still working in a bank.
You were holding on to the safety net for a long time.
My reasons for keeping my day job
while the rest of the band were full-time musicians...
It's a Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde existence.
I needed, after having been this rock'n'roll animal at the weekends,
to go back to something really boring where nobody knows who you are.
On Monday morning, you're just one of the stockbrokers at the bank.
I think that that was healthy for me.
My parents used to say, "Before you do anything artistic, get a trade behind you."
"Do your stand-up at night, but get up in the morning."
-It was the same thing with the band. -That was the weird thing.
All of the guys who did that are now out of work.
The shipyards and factories closed down.
Everything closed down. The stuff that was meant to make you secure is gone.
I'm the only one with a job.
But then you're waiting to live the dream.
You say, "Let's work for another two years."
Then you can quit your job and do whatever you want to do:
Doing stand-up or writing a novel.
What was the catalyst that pushed you to leave that safety net?
I think... Looking back,
I had to take a break from the band and the brokerage firm,
so I went to Australia and wrote my first novel.
The reason was that my father died four years earlier.
My father had had a very dramatic life.
And his plan when he retired
was to write the book about his years during World War II.
He died the same year that he retired, so he never had the time to do that.
And when my father died,
I realised that there are no guarantees that you're going to live forever.
There are no guarantees that you'll be here for the next three years.
The computers in those days would take 30 seconds to light up the screen.
So I would push an on button, and waiting for the usual numbers,
the Dow Jones, the Nikkei index, the oil price, stuff like that...
And during those 30 seconds, I realise I don't have time for this.
I have to write. So I went to the boss at the brokerage firm and said,
"Thank you, but I don't have time for this." He understood.
I have got a bit of a problem with Jo Nesbo.
I think I'm a little bit in love with him.
He's really cool, and he does what he wants.
I do that for the most part, creatively, but I still suffer a little bit from,
"How much for that job?" Which is something I grew up with.
Sometimes, when I hosted a game show, some comics would be like,
"You did that job for the money." "Yeah, I did it for the money."
When you come from a working-class background,
and get asked, "Will you do this job?",
your first question is, "How much do I get paid?"
I don't think Jo does that anymore,
but I think he understands what it is and has done it,
and to me that makes him a more relatable artist.
Did it ever occur to you...? Maybe this is out of line,
but did it ever occur to you to write the book your father wanted to write?
Well, I sort of did.
My father grew up in Brooklyn with my grandmother.
They came back to Norway just before World War II.
Germany then occupied Norway in 1940,
and my grandparents and my father...
He had grown up in this very anti-communist place and surroundings.
So they were more afraid of Stalin and Russia, that borders on Norway,
than of the Germans. Since Norway was occupied,
he made the decision at the age of 19 to volunteer to fight with the Germans
against Stalin's troop outside Leningrad.
So he spent the war in the trenches outside Leningrad.
-Jeez! -He was injured at the end of the war.
He went to Austria and then came back at the end of the war
and had to spend three years in jail for treason.
Those were the stories he wanted to tell.
Making a decision at the age of 19... How does the world look in 1940,
with all the old democracies more or less bankrupt, like England and France,
and Europe's future looking like it will be decided by Stalin or Hitler?
And then making that decision, and making the wrong decision, obviously.
He always said that, after the war...
"Spending three years in jail for being as wrong as I was, was a fair price to pay."
And my third novel, "The Redbreast", is about five young Norwegians
fighting with the Germans but with different motives.
-That was my father's story. -I never realised that's what it was.
All the most bizarre details in that book about the trenches outside Leningrad,
that's my father's stories.
I think so many people kid themselves...
There's no malice in it, but thinking, "I'll get to that,"
"whatever I dream of doing," and just don't.
I understand that. My father died very young. He was 44 and died of cancer.
And I did grow up with the sense that there is no guarantee
that you won't get sick or there won't be an accident.
My father died very young. My family has a family business in New England,
and it was expected of him that he would go to business school
and go back and run the company, and I know he never wanted to do that.
So when he got sick and died, having not followed the path he wanted to do,
I believe he died angry.
So I think that if you can avoid that...
Not that everybody should just throw life to the wind and live your dreams,
because you do have other people to consider,
but to die angry because you didn't make a decision or take the turn...
It seems so sad.
Most of the choices I've made, I think I would do them all over again.
Even knowing what I would lose, because you do lose something.
You can't do everything you want to do in life.
I could have, like most fathers would say, spent more time with my daughter.
She's 18 now. I know that I can't go back and have that time with her
when she was 8, 10, 12... I can't do that.
And I wish I could, but then there would be other stuff that I wouldn't do.
If that had meant that I wouldn't have had time to write one of my novels,
I still would have chosen the novel. I would.
I think when I became a parent, all my decision-making processes from that points
were all based on the welfare of my children.
It just changes you.
And I don't say that to appear particularly moral, it's just that that's the way it is.
I'm like, "I can't do that."
As practical as I am,
anytime I've looked in my life before Craig and I got married,
any of the decisions I made were really leaps of faith.
If you think too much about something, you probably won't do it.
If you just go with what your gut is saying... For me it's worked out for the best.
It's an interesting thing you said,
that you can't have everything that you want in life.
I think maybe people think that success is having everything that you want.
I sometimes think that about Vincent van Gogh.
He painted at least one of his great paintings in a lunatic asylum.
Today, he would have been given efficient medication to make him more comfortable,
and he would have been, I have no doubt, happier.
I wonder what choice he would have made.
Me, I'd be like, "I don't need to paint irises."
Do you ever think of living anywhere else?
I did. I mean, I have a job which means I can work from anywhere.
But I keep coming back here.
You know, when you're young and your parents talk about roots... "Boring."
"I don't need roots. I need to see new places."
At some point, you've seen so many places that it's luxury to wake up in your own bed.
The people you want to talk to are old friends. You don't need to explain everything.
You can just say, "You know who I am."
Norwegians aren't good with small talk to begin with.
I've noticed the Norwegians and small talk thing. They're bad at it.
-True. -Scottish people are a bit like that, too.
-And then they get liquored up bit and... -I think they chat, chat, chat.
-That's true. -As chatty as they come.
-I'm completely wrong about that. -They are social chat machines.
But I think that Charles Dickens should live in London in the 19th century.
You should live in Oslo.
Stephen King should live in a creepy part of Maine.
It is all of that. But I think, for myself, I wonder...
I don't have that. There's not an identifiable area of the world. I don't feel that anymore.
That's actually what I'm thinking.
We're thinking it's maybe time to get out of L.A.
-And...I'm thinking Norway. -Yeah, today, certainly.
-Scotland or Los Angeles? -Tough choice.
Leaving L.A... What would we lose?
The sound of the leaf blowers in the morning.
That beautiful chorus of pointless machines moving leaves from here to there.
Let's do a little pros-and-cons list.
Scotland... Bad weather.
-Los Angeles, bad... -Driving.
There's more to life than freeways.
Scotland, good schools don't cost much.
Los Angeles, not so great schools cost a lot.
Los Angeles starts to grate on your nerves after a while. Really sunny all the time...
I can't do any of this. Let's flip a coin.
All right. Heads - Scotland, tails - Los Angeles.
Let's make a wish instead. Take the coin and put it in the fountain...
...and whatever you wish for will come true.
It wasn't ever really a plan for me to be in Los Angeles.
And I definitely dream about leaving it.
-What did you wish for? -You'll see.
There's no such thing as predestination, there's only...
There's only Megan's choice. Yes.
Is this the last stop for you? Do you think there'll be another big career change?
I've had so many jobs in my life. I've worked as a taxi driver,
I've worked on a fishing boat, in a factory...
And stockbroker, musician...
Being a writer is the best job I've had.
I can't think of any job that is better than that.
So I think this might be what I'll be doing for the rest of my life.
-I hope so. -Satisfaction. That's wonderful.
I mean, cab driving... It's Uber now, it's a whole different thing, I mean...
-I wouldn't rule it out. -The thing is, Craig, I'm...
I'm actually a bad driver.
I drove a taxi for five years every summer holiday when I was a student.
I just... There was not much sign of improvement.
-I just don't have the talent for driving. -You stick with the writing...
...and leave the cab driving to the professionals.
-It's a lot of food for thought, isn't it? -He's a smart man, that Nesbo.
Yes, we've talked about choices, decisions and forks in the roads...all that today.
But I feel like, particularly with Jo, that chose him.
He kind of... That was in him.
He was always going to be a writer, whether or not... Yeah.
But what he regretted was rather touching as well.
He wished he'd spent more time with his daughter.
Let's find the kids and spend some time with them.
Oh, I can think we can...hold off a minute.
Subtitles: Jenny Gregory www.btistudios.coms