Lockerbie, review: Sky's series is a masterclass in compassionate documentary-making
Just after 7pm on 21 December, 1988, Pan Am Flight 103, bound for New York, exploded over Lockerbie. In an instant the quiet Scottish town was transformed into a smouldering hellscape – houses wrecked, bodies strewn across the golf course, the air thick with aviation fuel. It was clear that this was no accident: a bomb had gone off. Until 9/11 it was the deadliest terrorist attack in US history, and it remains Britain’s worst. Two hundred and seventy people died.
These things we know. But 35 years on, there are still bitter disputes over who was responsible (last December the US announced charges against a new suspect). Splicing footage with recent interviews, Lockerbie (Sky Documentaries, Saturday) offers a kaleidoscopic survey of the tragedy and its reverberations, in which – as David Johnston, one of the first reporters at the scene, put it – “nothing quite adds up”.
This is a masterclass in documentary-making, clear-eyed, humane and deft in its handling of conflicting perspectives. We begin at the crash site and move outwards – to the 845-square-mile crime scene; to the US, where most of the victims came from; to Libya, home of Abdelbaset al-Megrahi, the man convicted of the bombing in the Netherlands in 2001; then back to Scotland, where his case was appealed (and he was later released on compassionate grounds). Along the way we learn of internecine beef between the CIA and FBI, a fantasist supergrass, negligent airlines, shady geopolitical power play…
And yet for all that, it is intimate television. Anchored by human stories, the series (available as a four-part boxset) serves as a moving study of trauma and grief. We meet Elma Pringle and Moira Shearer, who cleaned victims’ possessions and sent them to their relatives. We follow the family of Frank Ciulla as they make one of many visits to the place where he died.
At the centre of the film are Jim and Jane Swire, whose daughter Flora was murdered. Jim, 87 and a former doctor, combine vulnerability – diagnosing himself as obsessive – with the Old Etonian self-possession that enabled him to fly to Libya and secure an audience with Colonel Gaddafi in the 1990s.
Today he believes that Iran was behind the atrocity. His “fury”, as he describes it, is palpable. But when he recalls the man who allowed him to take a lock of his daughter’s hair after he had identified her, I found myself in tears. “Human kindness can be very important when these things happen,” he adds. This is a tale of horror, but it was also one of love.
