by 
The BBC is to open up the format of Question Time by allowing people who aren’t hopeless simpletons into the audience.
The audience for the show has traditionally been drawn from people who would lose in a pub quiz to a chimp with a typewriter, but the corporation feels it’s time to expand their selection to people who are capable of at least rudimentary tool use.
In a major break from the established format, the BBC is proposing that people who can breathe and chew food at the same time unassisted might join the audience in limited numbers to see how it goes.
However, guests are not all happy at the news, as political pundit and regular panellist Simon Williams told us.
“Question Time is great exposure,” he said.
“As long as I restrict my answers to easy platitudes and proposals of wild state largesse that are both unfunded and unaffordable, but sound good, the audience honks and claps like ten rows of performing seals. It makes me feel really good.
“I mean last week some vacant troglodyte asked a boneheaded question and I just made up hundreds of billions of pounds in pretend money and suggested we spend that to solve the problem. They all applauded like electrocuted gibbons.It was great.
“Having to speak to an audience of people who aren’t monomaniacal clods will make my job considerably harder, which doesn’t seem fair.”
However, a spokesman for the BBC assuaged concerns that although they’re lifting what’s known as the ‘simpleton rule’ for the programme, they will still enforce a hard cap of ‘ill-informed and angry dullard’ on audience members for the time being.
