News Broadcasting
BBC, Fox to co-produce terrorism drama
LONDON: The BBC and Fox Television Studios in the US are joining forces to make a drama about a fictional terrorist attack on London.
The three part series The Grid will be told from the point of view of the US and UK anti-terrorist agencies and the terrorists themselves. The show is said to be loosely based on the BBC drama series Spooks.
The show is being produced by Fox and British company Carnival films, and will be shown on the BBC and TNT in the US. Carnival produced the highly-acclaimed 1989 drug-trafficking mini-series Traffik, which became the inspiration for Steven Soderburgh’s Oscar-winning 2001 film.
One of the show’s executive producers, Gareth Neame said, “There are quite a lot of similarities to Traffik. The Grid is an international project that looks in detail at a terrorist cell operating on a global level and how it carries out major terrorist acts and atrocities.”
A BBC spokeswoman said that the series would look at international terrorism in a way that Spooks – which deals with one story each episode – would not able to do. “Spooks is obviously UK based and this is looking at things on a much more global scale,” she said. She also said the series would be based on a fictional terrorist group.
One UK scriptwriter will join a team of US scriptwriters who are working on the show. The series will not be on screen until late next year at the earliest. The show’s total budget is expected to be about ?10m, and it will be based in the US, the UK and Africa.
News Broadcasting
News TV viewership jumps 33 per cent as West Asia war draws audiences
BARC Week 8 data shows news share rising to 8 per cent despite T20 World Cup
NEW DELHI:Â Even as individual television news channel ratings remain under a temporary pause, the genre itself is seeing a clear surge in audience attention.
According to the latest data from Broadcast Audience Research Council India, television news recorded a 33 per cent jump in genre share in Week 8 of 2026, covering February 28 to March 6.
The news genre accounted for 8 per cent of total television viewership during the week, up from 6 per cent the previous week. The spike in attention coincided with escalating geopolitical tensions involving the United States, Israel and Iran, which have kept global headlines firmly fixed on West Asia.
The rise is notable because it came at a time when cricket was dominating television screens. The high-stakes stages of the ICC Men’s T20 World Cup, including the Super 8 fixtures and semi-finals, were being broadcast during the same period.
Despite the cricket frenzy, viewers appeared to be toggling between sport and global affairs, boosting the overall share of news programming.
The surge in genre share comes even as the government has enforced a one-month pause on publishing ratings for individual news channels. The move followed regulatory scrutiny of the television ratings ecosystem.
While channel-level rankings remain temporarily out of sight, the genre-level data suggests that when global tensions escalate, audiences continue to turn to television news for real-time updates.
