This dramatisation about a bereaved father’s heroic hunt for truth gets far too bogged down in detail – and fails to spark any emotion at all
There have been several documentaries about the 1988 Lockerbie bombing, most of them very good: sober, un-sensationalist but deeply moving. It remains the deadliest terrorist attack in UK history. A bomb exploded on Pan Am flight 103 as it flew over the small Scottish town. All 243 passengers and 16 crew were killed. Eleven people were killed on the ground by the debris that suddenly fell out of the night sky.
Lockerbie: A Search for Truth dramatises the story of one bereaved father’s efforts to uncover what actually happened – how the bomb got on board the flight, who put it there, which organisation was behind it, and why the UK government seemed to be obstructing his pursuit at every turn. Jim Swire (here played by Colin Firth) was a GP living with his wife, Jane, and their children in Bromsgrove, Worcestershire, when the flight exploded with his about-to-be-24-year-old daughter Flora onboard. The drama is based on the book Swire co-wrote with Peter Biddulph, The Lockerbie Bombing: A Father’s Search for Justice, which is the distillation of the years of investigation and involvement he had with the case, including the eventual trial of two Libyan suspects and Swire’s work thereafter to convince the courts and the public that the one convicted man, Abdelbaset al-Megrahi (played by Ardalan Esmaili), was innocent of the crime.
