On 21 December 1988 a bomb exploded on Pan Am flight 103 over Lockerbie in Scotland, killing all 259 people on board and 11 on the ground. This meticulous, methodical five-part drama from Sky details what has and hasn’t happened in the 36 years since, through the perspective and the research of the father of one of the victims – Dr Jim Swire, played with careworn decency by Colin Firth.
Like last year’s fact-based hit Mr Bates vs the Post Office, the story pits a single man against injustice and bureaucracy, but here there is no resolution. Though Libyan Abdelbaset al-Megrahi was convicted of 270 counts of murder in a special court in the Netherlands in 2001 it’s still not conclusively known whether Libya, Syria, Iran or some loose terrorist alliance planted the bomb.
