BBC1’s weekly Question Time political debate shows are heavily over-subscribed. Only a couple of hundred tickets are typically available for would-be members of the studio audience, and far more than that apply to attend, so your chances of getting through the initial vetting are fairly slim. You’re especially unlikely to be selected if you’re not from the city where the show is being held, for obvious reasons.

While the group of failed Scottish Labour parliamentary candidates is, let’s say, rather larger than it used to be, it’s still a pretty select club of a few dozen people.

And if you DO make it into the QT audience, the chances of you being picked out to speak are also rather poor – not more than 1 in 10 at best, probably nearer 1 in 20.

So what happened on tonight’s edition from Dundee was quite the long shot.

The show was so openly, goadingly biased that a cynical viewer might easily come to the conclusion the BBC was purposely trying to reduce the Yes/SNP vote by means of heart attacks. With three Unionist politicians to two pro-indy ones, rather than even things up in a country split 50/50 on the constitutional question the Beeb chose to fill the sixth panellist slot with a public-school English Unionist Tory from the Telegraph, in the form of Tim Stanley.

It then somehow contrived to stuff the audience with what appeared to be people carefully chosen to be from anywhere BUT Dundee. There was barely a Scottish accent to be heard all night other than on the stage, and perhaps one from the city the episode was ostensibly taking place in.

And on the very few occasions John Swinney actually got to speak, he was never allowed to make it through a sentence without being interrupted, barracked and heckled by one or two of the other guests, and often chairman David Dimbleby too.

(Dimbleby also joined in as an active Unionist participant from time to time, explicitly backing up a quite extraordinary lie from the Unionist politicians that Scots voted in the indyref knowing in advance that there was going to be a referendum on the EU, which is utterly untrue. The Tories pledged one, Labour were opposed to one, and in September 2014 nobody knew which of them was going to form the government.)

But that wasn’t the good bit. Because given prominent airtime were not one but TWO of the aforementioned failed Scottish Labour candidates.

Early on came Braden Davy, a strange young chap from Morpeth in Northumberland who once formed an “independence for Northumbria” party but then moved to Aberdeen – an 80-minute drive from Dundee – to stand against Alex Salmond in Gordon, where he saw the Labour vote share plummet from 20.1% to just 5.9%.

He spoke at length in favour of a Brexit and against the idea of a second referendum in the event that Scotland voted to stay in and the UK voting to leave. But next up, just a few minutes later, was the real star performer.

Piping up with a GERS question was an audience member with an English accent (so as to blend in, presumably) who David Dimbleby identified as “Kathy Olibierti” – we’re guessing at the spelling – but who readers of Wings will know better as Kathy Wiles.

Wiles quit as Labour candidate for Angus after smearing some small children who took part in a protest at the BBC’s Scottish headquarters in Glasgow as being like the Hitler Youth. Targeting primary-school children was an outrage too far even for a party which regularly likens SNP voters to Nazis, and Wiles scuttled off into the darkness, though not before revealing offensive views on benefit claimants and immigrants too.

While she resigned as candidate, no mention was made in any of the newspaper reports about her of her being thrown out of the Labour party, whose chair in Angus, John Ruddy, is a prominent social-media activist and online commenter who locked his Twitter account during the furore over Wiles’ behaviour in order to avoid answering any questions about how he’d managed to overlook her foul but easy-to-find internet history when selecting her as candidate.

As far as we know, then, she’s still a Labour member and activist, just like Ian Smart, who was briefly suspended and then reinstated after a barrage of extremely offensive comments frequently involving the Nazis.

[EDIT 13 March: She definitely is – in the pic below she can be seen, third from left, campaigning in Arbroath two days after her Question Time appearance.]

But we’ve covered Scottish Labour’s fondness for harbouring abusive cretins in its ranks many times before and this isn’t the place to go into it again.

(Though it’s perhaps interesting that Jenny Marra, list MSP for North East Scotland, didn’t manage to recognise either of them.)

What we found ourselves wondering tonight was how TWO hapless, obnoxious Labour candidates managed to inveigle themselves onto a show that’s very hard to get into, and get themselves both picked to speak at length, yet with neither being identified as party candidates (you’re supposed to declare any such affiliations), one of them quite possibly from another city and the other using what may have been a false name (you have to provide identification).

(There are, of course, other possible reasons Wiles might have a new name.)

Tonight’s episode was such a colossal stitch-up in almost every other sense that even the most fair-minded independence supporter straining every sinew to avoid conspiracy theories would have their credulity stretched to the limit. We’ll wait with interest to see if any of the parties involved offer any sort of explanation.