$45m to say 'goodnight, Tonight'

AMERICAN TV broadcaster NBC yesterday announced it had reached a deal, worth $45 million (£28m), with Conan O'Brien for for him to leave the Tonight show.

The deal will allow the popular comedian Jay Leno to return to the late-night talk show he had hosted for 17 years.

NBC said that, under the deal, which came only seven months after O'Brien took over the reins from Leno, O'Brien would receive more than $33m (20m). The rest would go to his staff in severance.

Tonight's show will be O'Brien's last, and Leno will return to Tonight on 1 March.

O'Brien's manager, Gavin Polone, said: "Conan was appreciative of the steps NBC made to take care of his staff and crew, and decided to supplement their severance out of his own pocket. Now he just wants to get back on the air as quickly as possible."

NBC said O'Brien would be free to begin another TV job as soon as September. He landed the Tonight show after successfully hosting Late Night, which airs an hour later, since 1993. But he quickly stumbled in the ratings race against his CBS rival, David Letterman.

Under Leno, the Tonight show was the ratings champion on Tonight, but he also proved an instant flop with his experiment in prime-time television with The Jay Leno Show. Last week, NBC announced that the five-hour prime-time vacancy would be filled by scripted and reality fare. It had been no secret that the O'Brien, 46, was scoring puny ratings figures on Tonight, averaging 2.5 million viewers a night, compared with 4.2 million for Letterman's Late Show.

O'Brien said he was disappointed that NBC had given him less than a year to establish himself as host of Tonight.