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.
