Well, look, OK, Rosie O’Donnell and Elisabeth Hasselbeck obviously aren’t going to get it on at all, but that hasn’t stopped Rosie O’Donnell calling Elisabeth Hasselbeck ‘very attractive’ during an interview with Howard Stern yesterday.

We’ll get to the details in a moment, but for now let’s just mourn the fact that Rosie and Elisabeth aren’t able to genetically create their own child – because it’d have to be part O’Donnell and part Hasselbeck, and we could earn all sorts of money running a book on whether it’d come out fat and intolerant or skinny and paranoid.

Ever since her tenure at The View ended up with a blazing row and nobody wanted her to host The Price Is Right, Rosie O’Donnell has been existing in a diminished capacity lately. She’s given up booze and hung out with Cyndi Lauper a bit, but not a whole lot else. And now we know why.

Because Rosie O’Donnell is too busy daydreaming about her former crackpot right-wing co-host of The View Elisabeth Hasselbeck. So far Rosie’s got the daydream where they’re feeding each other strawberries in a sun-dappled meadow, the daydream where Elisabeth is rescuing Rosie from a burning building to the sound of I Want To Know What Love Is by Foreigner and the daydream where they’re both covered in oil and going hammer and tongs at each other with gigantic strap-on dildos on a revolving bed in a sex dungeon on a yacht.

It’s true – Rosie O’Donnell has confessed to Howard Stern that the very thought of Elisabeth Hasselbeck screeching on about the evils of abortion in her dreadful rape-alarm voice gets her so horny that she has to go and rub her crotch up and down on the corner of the nearest municipal building before she explodes.

Or, in a more truthful explanation, Howard Stern pestered Rosie O’Donnell on his radio show until she eventually admitted that Elisabeth Hasselbeck is sort of OK-looking for a hateful witch. Access Hollywood reports:

“Wouldn’t it have been the ultimate accomplishment to take this conservative girl and turn her, so to speak?… Were you not attracted to Elisabeth Hasselbeck?” Howard asked. “When you look at her physically, you don’t want her?” “See, the want is the big thing,” Rosie explained. “I find her very attractive. She’s very attractive, I think.” “Her body is perfect,” Stern commented. “Have you ever seen her biceps?” Rosie responded.

See? We knew it! That time Rosie O’Donnell and Elisabeth Hasselbeck had a screaming argument on The View, it was all down to pent-up sexual tension. If there had been any justice, the fight would have ended with Rosie and Elisabeth sweeping the papers off The View’s desk and making out with each other with tongues on top of it for like half an hour. It would have been like that porno we saw once, Disgusting Mind-Scarring Lesbians That Nobody Finds Sexy At All 4, we think it was called. It was hot.

Anyway, we were just kidding about the fight being down to sexual tension, because that’d mean that Rosie O’Donnell wanted to sleep with everyone she had a feud with. And god knows people have gone mad for less than imagining Rosie having a three-way with Donald Trump and Hulk Hogan.

Chairman of the BBC Trust Sir Michael Lyons has written to Mark Thompson, the Director-General, with a long list of things he wants the BBC to do better, but the main one is to make the news easier for thick people – or, as television people call them, 'low-approvers'. Keen to keep all the viewers it can in this multichannel age, the BBC is already responding – firstly by introducing a gormless 90-second round-up of the news after EastEnders and secondly by making sure that Question Time, Newsnight, Panorama, Real World, Sunday AM and The Politics Show now devote themselves entirely to Samanda from Big Brother and the wicked new trainers what Jeremy Paxman's just bought from JD Sports, innit.

Now that every bugger's got digital – and can therefore spend up to 15 hours of each day flicking backwards and forwards watching nothing but old episodes of Scrubs – it means that the BBC is in trouble, especially the news. Face it, given the choice would you rather watch Nick Robinson discuss the Liberal Democrat leadership battle or a seven-year-old episode of Never Mind The Buzzcocks on Dave +1? 

The second one, obviously. Because you are a low-approver, and the BBC is cacking itself about you.

BBC Trust chairman Sir Michael Lyons has been doing some research, and it seems that quite a lot of young people aren't watching the news because they find it a bit challenging. The BBC is already trying to amend that by introducing a 90-second news bulletin at 8pm on BBC One, where the woman who seems to think that all news is about her stands next to a screen summarising the day's top stories while pulling a series of grotesquely exaggerated facial expressions to help viewers understand that dead Iraqis are more serious than big-eared mice, all the while constantly jerking her head to one side like she's trying to stop the voices from telling her to murder.

And it's horrible, look…

But apparently this is what the low-approvers want. Funny, because we thought that people weren't watching BBC news any more because by the time a scheduled bulletin rolls around, they've already been on the internet and read all the news from a variety of global sources and generally have better things to do than spend 30 minutes watching some old people say what they already know. But no. According to Sir Michael Lyons:

“Performance in news and current affairs is rightly seen to be strong but the BBC is not always serving everyone in the audience as it should, with those who fall within the category of ‘low BBC approvers’ perceiving a performance gap.”

As well as this, Sir Michael requested that the BBC stopped using words like 'creative' and 'challenging' because low-approvers see them as meaning 'arty' and 'too clever for me'. From now on, Sir Michael Lyons has asked that BBC shows should only be described as either 'chung', 'proper nang' or 'so sick you'll bum it black.' 

However, it's not all bad news – Sir Michael Lyons also singled out several BBC shows for praise after conducting the research, saving special attention for Strictly Come Dancing, Doctor Who, The Apprentice, The Antiques Roadshow and Tribe, because that bit where Bruce Parry drunk a load of scabby blood was proper dutty fit, isn't it.

Also, it's important to point out that BBC Radio One's Newsbeat is exempt from Sir Michael Lyons' new low-approver drive, because if it dumbed down any more it'd be made of nothing but caveman grunts and slapstick sound effects.

Read more:

BBC Is Told To Make News More Attractive – Times