TV

Jimmy Fallon ‘can’t wait’ to take over ‘Tonight’

Jimmy Fallon is really, reeally excited to take over “The Tonight Show.”

“I can’t wait to go, I’m ready to start. I want to start tomorrow,” Fallon told The Post on a break from an affiliate tour with NBC-owned Ch. 4 Tuesday morning.

The host — who’s helmed “Late Night” at 12:35 a.m. since 2009 — will officially take the “Tonight Show” reins from Jay Leno on Feb. 17, and says he plans to keep his program mostly intact with the move to 11:35 p.m.

“I’m not going to go out to change anything, but just gradually it just will change because I’m getting older and it is an hour earlier,” he says, noting he’ll keep signature bits like slow-jamming the news, thank-you notes and playing games with celebrities.

“We will take everything that works on our show. We’re not going to do anything that drastic. It’s not reinventing the wheel,” he says. “We’ve seen that doesn’t work.”

Indeed.

The last time NBC attempted to hand off “Tonight” — from Leno to Conan O’Brien in June 2009 — things didn’t go so smoothly.

Fallon says the experience taught him to keep his head down and focus on the work, noting how he thought up his popular Neil Young impersonation bit during the tense back-and-forth between O’Brien and NBC brass. (O’Brien was eventually replaced on “Tonight” … by Leno.)

“Anything I learned was just work hard, just keep working and don’t worry about the outside stuff,” Fallon says. “Whatever happens will happen.”

Has he received any assurances from NBC that history won’t repeat itself?

“No, but I’m not worried,” he says. “I think it’s just the right thing at the right time. We’re different generations, Jay and I. It’s a change that makes a lot of sense.

“It’s definitely a younger audience — but I think I can hold both audiences.”

NBC will be putting a full-court press of promotion behind the Fallon-hosted “Tonight Show” during the network’s broadcast of the Winter Olympics, and Fallon knows there will be a lot of attention on the launch.

“I’m not Nostradamus but probably we’ll open up, follow the Olympics, have crazy-awesome ratings, then the Olympics will go away, our ratings will drop down [and] that will be a story,” he says. “But Seth [Meyers] will start [hosting ‘Late Night’], so maybe it could be the same and then at the end it will all be fine,” he says.

“We’ll figure it all out and in the end it’s either you watch me, [Jimmy] Kimmel or Dave [Letterman].”

Until then, work is underway on a new studio, whose walls, Fallon gushes, are designed by same people who did acoustics at Lincoln Center.

“We can have orchestras coming on our show it’s going to sound that good,” he says

The Roots — making the move with Fallon to “Tonight” as the house band — have grown to be like family, he says. But most of all, he’s excited to be bringing “The Tonight Show” back to New York after then-host Johnny Carson moved it from 30 Rock to LA in 1972.

“I’m psyched to bring it back to New York. It’s been over 40 years since it’s been here, and this is where it should be,” Fallon says.

“LA, it’s nice, but I think of sunshine and people on rollerblades eating sushi. New York, I think of nighttime, I think of Times Square and Broadway and nightlife and the city that never sleeps,” he says.

“The spirit, the energy. It should be here. This is where it started.”