News Broadcasting
BBC Tours wins silver in Visit London Awards
MUMBAI: BBC Tours in the UK has won the silver award in the Tour London Category of the Visit London Awards.
Around 50,000 people visit BBC Tours every year to see the UK pubcaster’s television centre in Wood Lane, west London.Nine tours of the centre are held daily, Monday to Saturday, and a new CBBC tour has been introduced for children.
On the tours visitors are likely to see television studios, BBC News and get the chance to use an interactive studio. On the CBBC tour, children also see studios where CBBC presenters work and may visit the Blue Peter garden.
BBC director of marketing, communications and audiences Tim Davie said, “This is a fantastic achievement by everybody involved with BBC Tours and is all the more impressive when you consider that London has so many attractions to visit. Thanks to BBC Tours thousands of people have enjoyed an insight into what goes on behind the scenes at Television Centre.”
BBC Tours took the silver award behind the London Eye in the Tour London category. Last year the London Eye was voted the world’s leading attraction by travel agents worldwide.
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.
