Healthy

Earlier in the day, the busy BBC News Press Team also risked cautionary words from Sergeant Wilson by tweeting the following: 

The reports online and in The Sun about Question Time audience numbers are untrue and the figures are wrong. Question Time achieved a healthy 1.3m viewers on 1 Oct and 1.4m on 19 Nov, a great performance by the team given the pressures of the pandemic. 

Even without looking at what The Sun said about Question Time audience numbers, it's hard not to agree with the huge upwell of comments in reaction pointing out the bleeding obvious: A 1.3-1.4m audience is pitifully small for a programme that Wikipedia reckons has an average 2.7m audience and which famously topped over 8m when Nick Griffin of the BNP was on. 

And bringing the pandemic into their defence surely crashes them into the buffers and requires the emergency services too: Many pointed out, quite reasonably I think, that with a captive lockdown audience supposedly turning to Auntie in the wake of Covid-19, viewing figures should have skyrocketed - especially for what the BBC considers to be its main forum for public debate.