Colin Firth tackles Lockerbie’s dark secrets in new TV drama
Not in the least dashing: Colin Firth plays Jim Swire, whose daughter perished in the Lockerbie explosion. Photo / supplied
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.