On the evening of 6 July 1988, the Piper Alpha oil production platform in the North Sea suffered a catastrophic gas explosion, followed by a conflagration that destroyed the structure; 167 people were killed, and almost all the physical evidence of what had occurred became charred debris, lost to the waves. After the disaster, a public inquiry struggled to form a complete picture of the event, for reasons that also make it a hard subject for documentary-makers.
Disaster at Sea: The Piper Alpha Story copes with the challenge superbly, leaning heavily on survivor testimony – 61 men escaped from the rig – and combining it with a simple 2D diagram of the platform’s layout to give us the fullest picture possible. It doesn’t have the special-effects budget that would be required to simulate the ferocity of the fire or the intensity of the thick, black smoke – possibly no amount of pyrotechnics or CGI would be able to do that anyway – so reconstructions of the disaster itself are kept to a minimum. Instead, the focus is on the verbal responses given by survivors to the inquiry, which have been dramatised. It’s excellent work by a cast of little-known actors, made all the more powerful by them using nothing but a chair, a table and the transcript.
