The four-part series Lockerbie is a masterly example of a true-crime documentary put together with great care and compassion, which offers compelling insights into a familiar story. The first episode sensitively recalls the disaster that took place over, in and around the Scottish town on 21 December 1988, when Pan Am 103, on its way from Frankfurt and then London to Detroit, via New York City, exploded mid-air, killing all 243 passengers and 16 crew on board, as well as 11 people on the ground. At first, it was called Britain’s worst ever air crash. Soon, it would also become known as the deadliest terror attack in US history, at that point.
There are plenty of ways to tell the story, and many have been attempted before, but this series takes a multilayered approach, through an extensive, substantial and wide-ranging series of interviews and archive news footage. It opens on the ground, as the residents of Lockerbie explain where they were and what they were doing on that terrible night, moments before a series of explosions blew in the windows. One was watching This Is Your Life, another plucking turkeys for Christmas. Upon leaving their houses, people could not make sense of what they saw. Some thought it must have been a military issue, others that a chemical tanker had exploded, but none could understand how there could be damage from one accident on both sides of the town.
