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BBC news ratings double

This article is more than 18 years old

BBC1's early evening news more than doubled its audience last night as people returning from work tuned in for the latest on the worst terrorist attack ever to hit London.

Nearly 7 million viewers watched the specially extended bulletin at 6pm, more than twice the 3.3 million who tuned in at the same time last Thursday night.

At the same time, a further 4.4 million were watching ITV's news coverage, which began at 10am when the broadcaster switched to its 24-hour news channel and continued throughout the day.

But the BBC dominated the viewing yesterday. As ever in times of crisis, audiences overwhelmingly turned to BBC1 throughout yesterday as the scale of the tragedy became clear.

BBC1 got off to a slower start than its chief rival, ITV, only switching to 24-hour news coverage at about 10.20 am - more than an hour after news broke of the first explosion.

But once it tore up the schedules and began simulcasting coverage from BBC News 24, BBC1's audience quickly picked up. By 11.45am 3 million people, two in every five viewers, were tuned to the channel, more than twice the channel's usual viewing figure for the slot.

Both BBC1 and ITV broadcast continuous coverage of the explosions and their aftermath throughout yesterday, giving them the lion's share of the viewing.

Channel 4 broadcast a specially extended lunchtime news bulletin, but failed to increase its usual audience - just 300,000 viewers watched between 12pm and 3.30pm, a 4% share of the viewing.

One in five of the available daytime audience watched ITV, while the BBC's share of the viewing reached 40% in the morning before falling back to 33% in the afternoon, according to unofficial overnight figures.

But later in the evening, viewing figures for the continuing news programmes tailed off as audiences sought light relief elsewhere.

At 7pm ITV's ratings leapt when it broke away from news coverage for the first time to show Emmerdale, which won 7.4 million viewers.

And BBC1's audience peaked at 7.45pm after it left its continuous news coverage for the first time since the story broke to show the latest developments in Albert Square. Nine million viewers watched EastEnders, a 45% share of the audience.

A Newsnight special on BBC1 presented by Jeremy Paxman at 8pm benefited from a strong lead-in from the soap to average 4.9 million in the ratings - impressive for a current affairs programme but still a million behind The Bill on ITV.

Newsnight on BBC2 later in the evening also increased its audience, with 1.3 million viewers tuning in, nearly one in 10 of the available audience.

Ratings for Channel 4's evening news also rose slightly, up to 1.1 million viewers from 800,000 on the same day last week.

The BBC scrapped its scheduled 9pm broadcast of the last ever edition of Ground Force, instead showing a repeat of an earlier episode of the show.

The Ground Force Mandela special managed just 2.3 million viewers, around half the audience watching ITV's two-hour news special in the same slot.

But by 10pm viewers appeared to have tired of the continuous news coverage, to the extent that BBC1's 10pm news was beaten by Big Brother on Channel 4.

Just over 4 million people watched the BBC's 10pm news, 300,000 fewer than watched Big Brother.

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