22 May 2025

The Bombing of Pan Am 103 is poignant and fascinating

I didn’t think we needed another drama about the Lockerbie air disaster. I was wrong.

It is a strange thing, to be moved by luggage; to be brought almost to tears by the sight of an unwieldy suitcase or a bulging holdall. But in The Bombing of Pan Am 103, the BBC’s new drama about the Lockerbie air disaster, baggage does a lot of work, emotional and otherwise. Obviously, in the first instance it’s a metaphor for lives cut brutally short at 31,000 feet. The crime scene on the ground below covered some 850 square miles, a radiating map of horror comprising bodies, fuselage and intimate possessions. Ten thousand pieces of evidence would eventually be gathered by investigators, among them the charred fragments of the suitcase that had contained the bomb that brought the plane down.

Perhaps, though, there’s more to it than this. So many were killed that night: 243 passengers and 16 crew; 11 souls in the small Scottish town of Lockerbie. How might a television series deal with such a number? In the first episode, we see people boarding the plane. They’re excited. It’s Christmas, and they’re on their way to celebrate with those they love. But we don’t get to know them, or to care about them: the demands of drama, as well as the complexity of this particular story, means there’s too little time.

It’s here, then, that luggage steps in. Oh, the tenderness of packing! Clothes carefully folded, more precious things layered in-between. In 1988, the wheeled bag was not yet ubiquitous. These suitcases, brown and ugly, are made of nylon and pleather, and as a result, tear all the harder at the heart. People travelled less then, and they took more with them. In their sateen-lined compartments is the whole of ordinary life, precious and sweet. It smells of toothpaste and aftershave and home.

I hadn’t expected much of Jonathan Lee’s series, maybe because Sky Atlantic’s Lockerbie drama earlier this year – Colin Firth played Dr Jim Swire, who spent decades fighting for justice for his daughter, Flora, who was killed in the bombing – was so disappointing, bogged down in detail and oddly flavourless. But it turns out I was wrong: this is a superior telling of the story, poignant and fascinating in equal measure. Lee, it’s clear, did a lot of research. His screenplay is attentive to the small things, as well as the big (for instance, to the determination of a group of Lockerbie women to return the victims’ possessions to their families, a job for which the Dumfries and Galloway Police have no time). But it benefits, too, from being an ensemble piece rather than a star vehicle. The lens is wide-angle, and all the better for it.

I’m not sure about the accent wielded by Tom Thurman (Eddie Marsan), an FBI explosives expert who lends his knowhow to the investigation; his vowels appear to be on a long-distance flight of their own, from Texas to Somerset and back again. The loaf-like wig worn by Moira Shearer (Phyllis Logan), who serves tea and pies to exhausted servicemen and women in a Lockerbie school hall, looks like it was filched from the wardrobe of a Seventies impressionist. But otherwise, I’m all in. If Peter Mullan is reliably proficient as DCS John Orr, the senior investigating officer at Lockerbie, Connor Swindells (yes, from SAS: Rogue Heroes) is even more dexterous as Ed McCusker, a sergeant who’s one of the first on the scene.

Partly, it’s physiological: that magnificent forehead of his, deployed here to signal kindness and concentration. But you have the sense, too, of an actor who’s always listening to his co-stars, responding to them rather than merely anticipating his own lines. He is pale, low key, entirely convincing.

On the night of the bomb, he finds a Lockerbie boy, Stephen (Archie McCormack), desperately combing the rubble of his home. Later, he visits him, taking with him one of his jackets for a forthcoming memorial service, and a bag of old comics. It’s such a delicate scene. What good are cartoons, or even a good jacket, in the face of such loss? Somehow, though, Swindells pulls it off, triteness dodged. The boy, understanding that this policeman is only doing his best, gives him a pass, and in that moment McCusker’s sudden shame becomes a gratitude you see in his shoulders as well as in his smile.