Leno Goes Out With a Bang on His Best Friday Ever

"Leno's Last Tonight Show Delivers Record Ratings," shouted trade paper Hollywood Reporter after NBC late-night host Jay Leno's final telecast as host of "The Tonight Show."

"Leno Scores," chimed in the New York Post.

In reality, Leno clocked his biggest Friday ratings in the metered markets, which represent about 70 percent of the country's viewers. This is known as damning with faint praise, given that Friday is historically Leno's lowest-rated night of the week.

If the best-Friday claim holds up when final national numbers arrive, he'll have outstripped the Friday record held by his New Year's Eve 1993 telecast, which featured Barbra Streisand right after she announced her first public concert appearances in 27 years -- which Time mag breathlessly heralded as The Music Event of the Century.

That "Tonight Show" episode clocked about 9.3 million. Guessperts are putting their money on Leno's finale having attracted about 11 million viewers -- nowhere near the more than 14 mil who caught his show March 19, when President Obama was his guest.

We wonder whether Leno might have drawn a much bigger crowd had his last guest as host of "The Tonight Show" not been Conan O'Brien -- the guy who caused NBC to show Jay the late-night door. (Five years ago, you'll remember, Conan threatened to bolt unless NBC promised to give him the keys to "Tonight" in '09.)

The ever-gracious Conan, his hair sprayed into a Bozo-flamed tsunami that refuses to break, came to tell Jay that he, Conan, attracts a younger crowd than does Jay. Conan also wanted Jay to know that he, Conan, has been wondering how he will play with "the older people" who are Jay's audience.

So, Conan shot a bit that's going to air next week on "Tonight," in which they got "some senior citizens" together and showed them clips of Conan on "Late Night." And Conan, who wanted to be there in person -- just cause -- got made up as Mrs. Doubtfire's fraternal twin so they wouldn't recognize him. They roll the tape of Old People who at least pretend not to recognize that their focus-group moderator has a prosthetic face, including one lady who actually is chortling at Conan's invisible-string-from-his-nipple gag, but another old lady who is not. Is there anything funnier than Stupid Old People?

"You can't please everyone?" Jay joked, politely.

"You'll see more of that next week," Conan promised.

Can't wait!

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Just a few hours after Leno's final "Tonight Show" appearance, in a much smaller pond, about 15 million caught the walkup to Susan Boyle's meltdown on "Britain's Got Talent."

That's nearly 70 percent of Britain's TV households being tuned in to watch Boyle's stunning second-place finish.

Stop me if you've heard this before: The "Talent" judges, including Simon Cowell, had anointed Boyle the winner of this year's competition because hers was far and away the greatest talent of the lot. Only, voting viewers turned on her because they considered her weird and strange and maybe a little off-putting. No, no, nothing so bad as black nail polish and guyliner -- it just turns out that Boyle, whom we fell in love with by the millions when we thought she was a sweet, daffy 48-year-old spinster who'd never been kissed, has a bit of a mouth on her.

So voters in Britain instead went with a sort of Mummenschanzesque "dance" troupe called Diversity. Boyle's behavior on the show was somewhat strange, though she mostly kept it together. But the day after the finale, she was admitted to a London clinic owing to "exhaustion." But it was all good for the network that broadcast "Talent" -- the finale goes into the books as the most popular TV show in the UK since the Euro 2004 soccer tournament, when 18.2 million watched England beat Croatia on BBC 1, according to the Associated Press.

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Meanwhile, in other news, Octomom finally has a producer.

Nadya Suleman, who gave birth to six boys and two girls in January and who has six other children, agreed to be filmed for a proposed television show by 3Ball Productions, according to her attorney, Jeff Czech.

The company, which is a subsidiary of Amsterdam-based Eyeworks International, hasn't yet sold the show about the Southern California mom to any American television network, he said.

Reportedly, "Octomom" -- our working title -- would be similar to another Eyeworks TV series in Denmark that documents the lives of four children from the day they were born until they become adults, AP says.

Her lawyer says Octomom liked the idea because -- you know what's coming -- Octomom will get to do some of the camera work herself. And a career is born. Or not.

3Ball is the company of "The Biggest Loser" and "For Love or Money."