Colin Firth anchors this dramatisation of the Lockerbie plane disaster
This series, starring Colin Firth, charts a man’s dogged quest for the truth about his daughter’s death in the UK’s deadliest terrorist attack.
Some theorists, like the writer Seth Borenstein, argue that it all started with the sinking of the Titanic, when 1500 souls tragically slipped into the icy waters of the North Atlantic. But whatever the origin, epic disasters have become central narratives of our age; both absorbing and disturbing.
We see air crashes, especially, as inexplicable, beyond our ability to control or even place within any context of reality. Our sense of control may be shaken and the feeling of being vulnerable may become quite intense as we try to understand the meanings of suffering and death.
And certainly, there have been few disasters as confronting as what happened to Flight 103 on December 21, 1988. The Pan Am aircraft, a Boeing 747 known as Clipper Maid of the Seas, left London’s Heathrow Airport headed for New York City. At 7.03pm the plane levelled off at 31,000 feet, just north of the border between England and Scotland in the Dumfries and Galloway region, and an explosion blew a basketball-sized hole in the fuselage. The plastic explosive, concealed in a Toshiba radio cassette player that detonated in the forward cargo hold inside a Samsonite case, triggered a sequence of events that led to the rapid destruction of the aircraft.
Flight 103 broke apart and fell to earth. Winds scattered victims and debris along a 130km-long corridor, more than 2180sq km in area. The plane carried 259 men, women and children; all were killed, along with 11 Lockerbie residents, as a result of the terrorist bomb inside that suitcase in the forward cargo hold.
Lockerbie: A Search for Truth dramatises the story of Jim Swire, played with sterling commitment by Colin Firth, a GP living with his wife, Jane, the equally solid Catherine McCormack, and their children in Bromsgrove, Worcestershire, when Flight 103 was blown out of the sky. Their about-to-be 24-year-old daughter, Flora, was onboard. She had been travelling to visit her boyfriend in America for Christmas when she became a victim of the deadliest terror attack in British history.
The five-part series is a true crime detective story, a densely plotted conspiracy thriller, a kind of morality play, and the intimate, at times grim, account of a man’s attempt to come to terms with his grief. A man who had no idea how much he would struggle with powerful political forces as he doggedly sought an explanation for a disaster that claimed his daughter.
But by its end, his dedication to what becomes a kind of righteous crusade for justice, valiant and well-meaning as it is, brings no great comfort. He’s left with only competing arguments about what occurred and confusion about who was responsible. As the long-suffering Jane says at the end of the drama, “Maybe the only truth is, we’ll never really know what happened”.
Her husband’s search for this truth, which takes him more than 20 years, to the detriment of his life with Jane and their family, reveals not clarity but obfuscation at the highest level. And the suspicion that for reasons of realpolitik both the American and UK governments knew about the threat ahead of time.
As Swire said recently, commenting on the series, if nothing else it shows “just how vulnerable the official version is to proper probing of what really lies behind this terrible atrocity”.
Lockerbie: A Search for Truth is from Carnival Films in a co-production with Sky Studios, Carnival having also brought us the hit production The Day of the Jackal. Gareth Neame and Nigel Marchant are executive producers for Carnival Films and renowned Scottish playwright David Harrower (Blackbird, Knives in Hens) is lead writer. Award-winning Otto Bathurst, best known for his work on Peaky Blinders, is series director.
The series is based on Lockerbie: A Father’s Search for Justice, co-written by Swire and Peter Biddulph. (Biddulph appears to be a reasonably unknown writer but gained some notoriety according to his publisher, when working on this project with Swire – within 10 days his computer was accessed, and his files and notes were copied.)
“We are faithful to what Jim thinks, but also very clear that there are many people who disagree with Jim,” Bathurst explains in the production notes. “We’re not a documentary in any way, shape or form. Even though we’re telling Jim’s story, that doesn’t mean it becomes myopic in any way.”
He adds, “It was vital for us to show the bigger picture”.
Unfortunately, that “bigger picture” becomes a little dense after a startling opening episode.
It begins in May 2000, as a man enters an area constrained by bars, a prison’s waiting room, a guard asks him, “All that blood on his hands? How can you, of all people, bear to be in the same room as him?” The man Swire is visiting turns out to be Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed al-Megrahi, well portrayed by Ardalan Esmaili, a Libyan national who would be the only person convicted of the Lockerbie bombing.
It’s a neat, oddly perplexing opening sequence, setting up several rabbit holes Swire’s journey takes us down. We then abruptly cut to December 21, the night of the bombing. It’s a peaceful scene as the doctor and his wife farewell Flora (Rosanna Adams) as she is about to take a cab to Heathrow. We then see Flora on board, the passengers singing, Rudolph, the Red-Nosed Reindeer, a crate is loaded into the cargo hold, and then the plane explodes, the horror experienced from the ground. It’s a visceral, astonishing sequence. Bodies are scattered, debris falls on cars, including a police vehicle, and houses suddenly disappear.
A farmer wonders who the men are getting into a van near burning sections of the plane. Are they crash investigators, as they claim? How did they arrive so quickly on the scene? Dumfries Courier reporter Murray Guthrie (Sam Troughton) enters the devastation after hearing the news while driving nearby. He sees a girl’s body hanging from a tree. In time, he becomes crucial to the story.
The Swires slowly learn of their daughter’s fate, the information frustratingly slow in coming, and Jim eventually identifies her body on a pallet at an ice rink, where many of the dead have been taken. He can only recognise her by her feet. Jane, in an extraordinary scene, counts slowly to 15: the number of seconds her daughter may have been awake as she fell.
Swire eventually teams up with Guthrie in an obsessive search for the truth of what happened, going from leading the Lockerbie bereavement group to exposing lax airport security to confronting Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi in a tent in the desert. This is presented as a conspiracy mystery presented with a kind of immersive vigour, moving so quickly it’s hard to discern just what might be fact and is more likely conspiratorial fantasy.
Swire encounters a mesmerising maze of suppressed security alerts, controversial arrests and incarcerations, and the overwhelming stench of self-interested politics obsessed with the global oil market and the preservation of regime stability.
He also discovers what seem like unfathomable inconsistencies in the ways that the destruction of Flight 103 was investigated that eventually leave him exhausted. His relationship with his family is jeopardised and it’s hard to fathom why his wife tolerates his obsessive pursuit of justice.
It’s a complicated journey, without a great deal of action. which Bathurst cleverly makes cinematic with his use of interesting camera angles and an often compelling use of extreme close-ups.
Swire suffers a kind of complicated grief that becomes almost a form of bereavement disorder so severe he has trouble restoring his life. It’s well portrayed by Firth who never lets sentimentality take over and he carries the complex plot through some, at times tortuous, twists. And Catherine McCormack’s Jane emotionally anchors his journey, his ceaseless campaign, in a somewhat underwritten role.
Lockerbie: A Search for Truth streaming on Binge.
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