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By STEPHEN BATTAGLIO -- Daily News (New York) -- July 28, 2003 -- Section: TELEVISION; Pg. 77 HOLLYWOOD - After 10 years of doing the late, late shift, Conan O'Brien is ready for "The Tonight Show" - if NBC asks. "Obviously 'The Tonight Show' is the big boat," the host of "Late Night" told members of the Television Critics Association last week. "I've had a Boston Whaler for a while, and it's really fun. They turn nicely and I think I drive it well, but if someone said, 'Hey do you want to drive this big boat for a while?,' I'd love to do it." But O'Brien, who took over for David Letterman in the 12:30 a.m. hour in 1993, isn't expecting current "Tonight" host Jay Leno to depart anytime soon. He also doesn't assume that he gets the job when Leno does pack it in. "It's a little bit like saying my ambition is to be pope," O'Brien said. "So much weird stuff has to happen for you to become pope and so much of it is out of your control, that I don't know, the timing might not be right for me. Jay may want to do it 10, 15, 20 more years, and then I'm not going to succeed him when I'm 60 or 50, so I don't know." O'Brien admits he'd like to be seen before midnight sooner than that. He said he meets many people who enjoy the daytime reruns on Comedy Central who never watch the show in late night. "Would I like it to someday be on earlier and be seen by more people? Yes, I think that would be nice," he said. "How that happens, I have no clue." But just being able to have a 10th anniversary on "Late Night," which will be celebrated in a 90-minute special on NBC on Sept. 14, is a testament how far O'Brien has come. Such an event seemed unlikely in the show's early days, when TV critics believed he was an unworthy successor to Letterman and nervous NBC executives threatened cancellation. Eventually, O'Brien caught on - especially with the college-age crowd advertisers like to target - and he became an long-term employee of NBC. Looking back, O'Brien said the early struggle doesn't faze him. "Going through the thousand-mile-long spanking machine that we went through helped earn the right to be there," he said. "It was difficult. And we just decided, 'Suck it up, get better every day.' So here we are. I don't have any regrets." GRAPHIC: CONAN O'BRIEN explains there's no systematic way to get from 'Late Night' to 'Tonight.' Copyright 2003 Daily News, L.P. Daily News (New York) |