True Crime Tuesdays: Lockerbie: A Search for Truth
Review Overview
Humanity
10Justice
7Truth
8Helen Archer | On 21, Jan 2025
When Pan Am flight 103 exploded over the small Scottish town of Lockerbie on an otherwise normal evening, days before Christmas in 1988, it marked a collective loss of innocence. Taking all 259 lives on board, and 11 on the ground the plane crashed into, it remains the deadliest terrorist attack on British soil (and was documented in the moving 2023 series Lockerbie).
For Jim Swire, the father of Flora Swire – who was on the plane travelling to New York the day before her 24th birthday – it was not only a personal tragedy, but the beginning of a labyrinthine journey deep into the heart of international geopolitics; a world of deadly diplomatic skullduggery, intelligence agency interference, complicated cover-ups, and unwitting patsies. This five-part series, directed by Otto Bathurst and Jim Loach, and starring Colin Firth as Swire, is based on the his book Lockerbie: A Father’s Search for Justice. Though here, rather tellingly, ’justice’ has been replaced by ‘truth’.
While Episode 1 depicts, in harrowing detail, the crash itself, the following episodes cover the following two decades – and beyond – during which Swire, as spokesperson for the Lockerbie families group, pressed first for a public inquiry, then – after suspects were eventually identified – for a trial. Teaming up with a local journalist Murray Guthrie (Sam Troughton) – who was on the scene in the immediate aftermath of the crash – Swire is, at first, the straight man to Guthrie’s ‘conspiracy theorist’. But as the years progress, as increasingly urgent montages of real-life news reports intersperse the drama, he has no option but to come round to Guthrie’s way of thinking, in a journey which sees him taking dangerous trips to Libya, meeting with Gaddafi, and flying himself while carrying a mock-up bomb.
During the course of the long-awaited trial, which saw Baset al-Megrahi (Ardalan Esmaili) found guilty and sentenced to life imprisonment, Swire realises that lies are being told, for political and economic expediency, and, despite the verdict, becomes convinced of his innocence. A friendship develops, lasting until the end of Baset’s life – and Swire vows to continue fighting to clear his name, considering al-Megrahi to be the 271st victim of Lockerbie.
Humanity – something sadly lacking in all too many portrayals of Middle Eastern politics – is here in abundance. Swire’s activism separates him, emotionally (and, laterally, physically) from his two remaining children and his wife, Jane (Catherine McCormack), who are dealing with their personal tragedy in very different ways. But these are ordinary people, caught up, unwittingly and unhappily, in world events. As well as being a profoundly moving portrayal of grief and loss, this dramatisation asks bigger questions, about the machinations behind the headlines which become accepted as fact. Swire’s mission is doomed to failure – the more he finds out, the more the sands shift beneath him. But his search for the truth in a world built on lies is a heroic one, and one this dramatisation does do justice to.