Everything changed after Lockerbie. The summer that followed was the one when the American tourists didn’t come to Britain and London’s West End felt their absence. They eventually returned – but there were more enduring changes to the way we move around the planet.
After a bomb in an unaccompanied suitcase in the hold of Pan Am flight 103 exploded over the Scottish town of Lockerbie on the night of December 21, 1988, killing all 259 people on board and 11 more on the ground, it got harder to fly. The “did you pack your own bag?” question and various other security measures aimed at connecting us with our luggage became globally ubiquitous.
Remarkably, what happened that night in 1988 is still not settled – at least not to the satisfaction of Jim Swire, the Midlands doctor whose daughter Flora died on the flight, and whose personal story is dramatised in the five-episode series Lockerbie: A Search for Truth.
Swire, who became the spokesperson for the group UK Families Flight 103, helped expose truths about the flight that eventually led to the 2001 conviction of Libyan intelligence officer Abdelbaset al-Megrahi of the murder of 270 people. But Swire continues to advance a different theory, one not shared by many other Lockerbie families, especially those in the United States, which presents a problem for the drama.
Swire’s alternative theory (the producers are treating the details as a spoiler, but you could always just look it up on Wikipedia) is “his opinion and it’s an opinion shared by many other people, but it is not shared by everyone”, says executive producer Gareth Neame.
“We acknowledge that there are many families who hold a completely different opinion. So as a drama, we’ve endeavoured to show that by never saying whether Jim’s version of events is correct or not. There’s a lot of evidence to say that it might be, but equally, there’s contradictory evidence as well. We are telling Jim’s story from his perspective.”
That perspective is carried by Colin Firth in the lead role. Firth is not in the least dashing as the local GP who keeps asking questions. He plays Swire as a middle-aged man crushed by the loss of his daughter, seeming to wade through cement towards answers he can’t get.
It’s an impressive and markedly subtle performance, set against that of Catherine McCormack as Swire’s wife Jane, whose emotions become more complex as her husband’s mission intensifies.
The series was adapted by David Harrower from Lockerbie: A Father’s Search for Justice, written by Swire with the journalist Peter Biddulph and published in 2021. It offers a customary disclaimer to the effect that “some names, characters and scenes have been changed or fictionalised for dramatic purposes,” and seems to stretch that by inserting a fictional character into a key role.
The slovenly Scottish newspaper reporter Murray Guthrie (Sam Troughton), who befriends Swire and feeds him information for the next 25 years, is officially an amalgam of several real people. It’s Guthrie who witnesses the aftermath of the explosion, in the village of Lockerbie, where steel and fire rained from the sky, and the nearby farm where most of the bodies fell. These are wrenching and convincing scenes.
But although Biddulph, the real journalist, didn’t start working with Swire until 1999, his experience underlines another theme in the series. He had barely started work when, by his own account, “someone” had accessed his computer and copied all notes and files, including the manuscript of what would eventually become the book. The idea that state forces are conspiring against the public enters Lockerbie: A Search for Truth early on and is, in some ways, more compelling than any wrangle about who really committed the attack.
“Jim Swire is a man who stood up to the establishment,” says Neame’s fellow executive producer Nigel Marchant. “If you look back to when this happened, we believed in our government. We believed that courts of law did the right thing. I think that has changed over the 35 years since the tragedy. There’s less trust in government. So, there’s kind of a social history in there as well.”
So, not just Lockerbie as an event that changed air travel, but Lockerbie as the first in a series of erosions of the British public’s trust in its leaders. The Thatcher government stonewalled calls for an independent investigation, including into whether threat warnings were withheld.
Lockerbie: A Search for Truth, which was produced for Sky TV in the UK, will not be the only Lockerbie drama you can watch this year. A date for the BBC production Lockerbie, which reportedly focuses on British and American government investigations into the attack, is due to be announced for domestic screening and global distribution via Netflix.
Remarkably, the appearance of twin (and possibly duelling) dramatic accounts of what happened that night in 1988 and thereafter likely isn’t just a coincidence. All these years on, Lockerbie isn’t over.
In 2020, the US government announced that another Libyan, Abu Agila Masud, was in custody and he was charged in 2022 in connection with the attack. His trial is set for May this year in a Washington DC court. How it will play out in the febrile America of 2025 is anyone’s guess.
For now, ahead of the drama in the courtroom, there is the drama on TV. “I hope that, if nothing else, audiences come away with this feeling that it’s murky, you know?” says Marchant. “The official line that we’ve been told has a lot of holes in it. There’s a lot of evidence that doesn’t hold up. I certainly feel there’s an element that something is being hidden from us.”
Lockerbie: A Search for Truth: TVNZ 1 from Sunday, February 16, 8.30pm, and TVNZ+.
