When the Scottish playwright David Harrower set out to script a TV adaptation of “The Lockerbie Bombing: A Father’s Search for Justice” — Jim Swire’s skeptical book laying out who he believed was really responsible for the deadliest terrorist attack in British history — he had to ask himself: What if Swire was wrong?
In 1988, Swire’s daughter was one of 270 people killed in the bombing of an American jetliner, Pan Am Flight 103, the wreckage of which crashed in the remote Scottish town of Lockerbie. His book, co-written with Peter Biddulph, argues that Abdel Basset Ali al-Megrahi, a Libyan man convicted over the bombing, was set up by his government, that his trial was effectively a sham, and that the entire investigation was cloaked in lies and coverups.
The book is driven by righteous certainty — which Harrower wanted to avoid onscreen.
“Swire is such a dogged, driven figure, completely confident about what he believes in,” Harrower said. But, he added, “There are other people in the world who believe the opposite of what he believes. So I couldn’t make a drama without asking, ‘What if all this is actually driven by grief?’”
“Lockerbie: A Search for Truth,” now airing on Peacock, is about Swire’s decades of campaigning and research, but the series “is not a hagiographical treatment,” Harrower said. Instead, the show is as much about the nature of obsession as it is about justice.
Like other paranoid thrillers including “Zodiac” or “The Insider,” the answers always seem slightly out of reach. Yet Colin Firth’s Swire determinedly sticks with the case, even as people around him, including his wife Jane (Catherine McCormack), see the sense in moving on.
“We are very clear in this show that we don’t hold a view, but we are telling Jim’s story, and Jim’s version of events,” Gareth Neame, an executive producer on the series, said. “He has an opinion that he holds very strongly, but many others don’t.”
If there’s one thing that the producers were sure about from the beginning, it was that they wanted to cast Firth, who they felt would best embody Swire’s balance of self-doubt and determination, as well as his strong moral code. “It’s very rare that you get your first choice,” Nigel Marchant, another producer, said. “It’s an absolutely brilliant, measured performance that encapsulates both a study of grief but also this great determination for the truth.”
Firth met with Swire before production started, and said in an email that he was struck by Swire’s “bracing clarity and focus.” He said he explained to Swire and his wife that “it was in the nature of dramatic portrayal that they might not recognize themselves,” and was impressed when they “made no attempt to impose any ideas or steer the portrayal.”
The series opens with the shock of the tragedy, as the ill-fated 747 explodes in midair and quite literally falls out of the sky. When the Swires hear the news, they are devastated, and the parents release torrents of outrage and grief — a bracing introduction to the characters and the show.
But as the story unfolds and the focus shifts to the aftermath, Swire throws himself into amateur detective work and protracted legal battles with the British government, perhaps avoiding the much harder work of mourning. The character is sympathetic — Firth is hard to dislike — but with an edge of peskiness.
Initially, the Pan Am bombing became an international diplomatic issue, with Western sanctions costing Libya an estimated $30 billion, and the trial provoked a media frenzy — as did the later release, on compassionate grounds, of al-Megrahi, who died of cancer in 2012. But Swire, now in his late 80s, has watched as the tragedy slowly faded from the popular imagination.
“As time went on, fewer and fewer people cared, or even knew about, the disaster,” Firth said. Swire “was increasingly doubtful as to whether the full truth would ever be known in his lifetime,” Firth added.
The creators of “Lockerbie” also want to reignite public interest in the tragedy, and perhaps to inspire people to continue asking questions about who, exactly, was responsible for it. McCormack, who plays Swire’s wife, said Swire had “seemed very pleased that this has been made, because it’s bringing it back into people’s awareness again.” She added, “He’s been fighting this fight for so many years, and this is an opportunity again for him to kind of shine a light on it.”
For people who remember the Lockerbie bombing, it can be hard to believe that its memory has faded at all. “This is something that had, in various ways, a huge impact on all of us,” Firth said. “Lockerbie shook everyone.”
But while making the show, it also became clear to Firth that the world had moved on. “When I thought back over my life in the three and a half decades since the crash — and all that had happened since — it really hit me how long Jim, his family and thousands of others, had carried this,” Firth said. “Every minute of that time spent living with that loss.”
