After being battered by late-night talk shows over his crack cocaine scandal and antics, Toronto’s embattled mayor is suggesting he may become a guest on one of the television programs.
In the latest batch of videos in his “Ford Nation” YouTube series with his brother, Mayor Rob Ford suggests he doesn't want to or seek to be in the spotlight and tells viewers he isn’t an international celebrity, but then hints that he may go on a chat show.
The topic came up when the Fords responded to a question that was supposedly sent in by a “Ford Nation” viewer. The question was about how the mayor juggles his work as a politician and the attention he receives as an “international celebrity.”
“Number one, folks, I am not an international celebrity,” the mayor says in the video. “I’m an average, hard-working guy that goes to work every day, comes home to their family, takes my kids out, supports my wife and family and does whatever I can. That’s what normal fathers do.”
Rob Ford says he tries to spend as much time with his family while attending as many events as he can, and he accused the media of “trying to get me off my game.”
“I am not a celebrity and I don’t like being called an international celebrity,” Ford says. “If the late-night shows want to make fun of me, that’s their job. Let them make fun of me.”
That’s when Doug Ford chimes in, telling his brother that he fields calls “every night” from programs that want the mayor as a guest.
“You know something? You might go on one of them,” Doug Ford says.
“I’m gonna be on a plane going somewhere. You just said it, you heard it first,” Rob Ford responds as the video, titled "Ready for late night?", ends without further details.
For months, Ford has been the butt of jokes on major television networks in the U.S.
Late-night funnymen have had a field day, ridiculing the mayor over everything from his crack cocaine admission and the Steak Queen video to the crude remarks he made to journalists and the time he walked face first into a television camera at city hall.
This month, Toronto Star reporter and author Robyn Doolittle, one of the journalists who has uncovered allegations about the mayor's personal life, including a video that allegedly shows him smoking from a glass pipe, has appeared on two U.S. late-night shows to promote her book, "Crazy Town: The Rob Ford Story."
After appearing on Comedy Central's "The Daily Show with Jon Stewart" on Feb. 6, Doolittle appeared on NBC's "Late Night with Seth Meyers" early Thursday morning.
Meanwhile, the Fords released three new YouTube videos Thursday, exactly eight months before the municipal election.
In one of the clips, the brothers accuse Waterfront Toronto of wasting money and holding up development along Lake Ontario, saying Toronto’s lakefront pales in comparison to that of Chicago, where the Ford family business – Deco Labels and Tags – has an office.
