Lockerbie drama is a punch to the gut with a stellar performance from Colin Firth
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Controversial five-part series stars Firth as Dr Jim Swire, whose daughter died in the UK’s deadliest terror attack. It is strange the way that certain television genres gravitate to particular times of the year. High fantasy in the scorching summer, murder mysteries in the Christmas gloom, and, now, complex historical injustices to kick off the new year. Following in the footsteps of Mr Bates vs the Post Office, which galvanised the public discourse in January last year, comes Lockerbie: A Search for Truth, a new Sky Atlantic five-part dramatisation of the fallout from the worst terror attack in the history of the United Kingdom.
![[Jim Swire became obsessed with the case]](https://static.independent.co.uk/2024/12/18/15/02_01_Lockerbie_S01.jpg)
December 1988: a young, ebullient PhD candidate, Flora Swire (Rosanna Adams) boards a plane for New York. She is travelling to spend Christmas with her American boyfriend, but a bomb explodes over the Scottish town of Lockerbie and Flora, along with the other 258 occupants of the aircraft and 11 people on the ground, are killed. “The scale of this disaster is unmatched,” a local reporter, Murray Guthrie (Sam Troughton), declares amid the fiery wreckage littering the streets. At their home in the village of Finstall, near Birmingham, GP Jim Swire (Colin Firth) and his wife Jane (Catherine McCormack) slowly realise that the breaking news – of a plane crash in the Southern Uplands – concerns the flight that Flora, their daughter, was on.
The death of his eldest child sends Swire on a quest for truth. Not justice, which is fleeting and fickle, but an understanding of how and why his daughter died. Swire’s campaign – which stretches across the Thatcher, Major and Blair governments – will turn him into a minor celebrity. Stunts, including carrying a marzipan bomb on a transatlantic flight and going off-piste to visit Colonel Gaddafi in Tripoli, will bring him to the attention of the public and the authorities. But, at its heart, this is the story of a man trying to come to terms with a trauma he cannot fully understand. All the geopolitics, all the diplomacy, all the espionage – what matters to Swire is finally achieving some resolution. It is a journey that will take him on a strange trajectory, from bereaved father to political campaigner.
