Exit strategy

Jay Leno helped NBC's co-presidents announce his departure date from "The Tonight Show" at a meeting of the Television Critics Association in Beverly Hills yesterday. Disguised in a bald cap, glasses, and a goatee, and posing as a reporter, Leno posed the first question to co-presidents Ben Silverman and Marc Graboff. ABC's late-night star Jimmy Kimmel pulled a similar stunt last week. Leno dropped the bomb right away, asking when he will depart "The Tonight Show." Graboff said Leno's last night will be May 29, 2009, and Conan O'Brien will debut Monday, June 1. NBC has offered Leno alternatives to keep him at the network, but no agreement has been reached. (Comcast.net TV)

Roger Ebert is leaving the balcony. The famed film critic said that he is cutting ties with the nationally syndicated program he and the late critic Gene Siskel made famous, a day after Richard Roeper said he was quitting the show. In an e-mail, Ebert said Disney-ABC Domestic Television, which owns "At the Movies With Ebert and Roeper," has decided to take the program in a new direction. (AP)

Radio talk show host Michael Savage, who described 99 percent of children with autism as brats, said yesterday he was trying to "boldly awaken" parents to his view that many people are being wrongly diagnosed. Some parents of autistic children have called for Savage's firing after he described autism as a racket last week. "In 99 percent of the cases, it's a brat who hasn't been told to cut the act out," Savage said on his radio program last Wednesday. His show is carried on about 350 stations, including WRKO-AM (680) in Boston. (AP)

Amy Winehouse's husband was sentenced yesterday in London to 27 months in jail for assault and obstructing justice. Blake Fielder-Civil has admitted beating up a pub manager in a barroom fight in 2006 and then offering him $400,000 to keep quiet about it. The judge told Fielder-Civil he had behaved in a "gratuitous, cowardly, and disgraceful" way. Winehouse, who has regaled concert audiences for months with appeals for the release of "my Blake," was not in court. Fielder-Civil has spent almost nine months in jail and could be freed early in December. (AP)

'I had to cut my hair for Gabrielle because she's a mom now. . . . She's really simple, she has no makeup, she's frumpy, and so I cut my hair.' "Desperate Housewives" actress Eva Longoria Parker, explaining her short crop to Access Hollywood's Billy Bush.