The BBC drama The Bombing of Pan Am 103 wants to show that the terrorist attack that killed 270 people in Lockerbie, Scotland, is “not just something from the past” but still an ongoing story even after 36 years, writer Gillian Roger Park tells Yahoo UK.
Stream all the episodes of The Bombing of Pan Am 103 on BBC every Sunday and Monday! Viewers outside the UK can watch it using a VPN.
The show follows the investigation into the Pan Am flight 103 explosion on 21 December 1988, which killed all 243 passengers, 16 crew members, and 11 people from the town. It tries to tell the story as truthfully and carefully as possible to bring attention back to the victims and their families.
This matters because the case is still open, with the suspected bomb maker Abu Agila Mas’ud Kheir Al-Marimi, also known as Masud, expected to go on trial in the US. While making the drama, the writers had to keep track of any new updates or changes in the case.
It made us very mindful of how to bring that into the story and to make sure that we were representing it accurately truthfully as possible because we knew the trial was coming up. But it’s just absolute coincidence that it happened, it was unbelievable really, but it just goes to show how enduring this story is that it’s literally still developing and it’s almost 40 years old. We were in the writers room as it was developing, it really did inform what we chose to include, but also actually when you you go back and look at the evidence in what the police were investigating at that time it would have made sense to include him anyway, so we didn’t do it on purpose. If the trial hadn’t been coming up he still would have been part of it. It would have been inaccurate not to include his name as coming up in the later stages of the investigation.
Park explains
So far, only one person has been charged in connection with the bombing: Libyan intelligence officer Abdelbasset al-Megrahi. He was given a life sentence in 2001 and stayed in prison until 2009, when he was let out on compassionate grounds after being diagnosed with terminal cancer.
What we really wanted to put across is that this is a developing story. It’s not just a piece of history that we are talking about, it’s justice that hasn’t really been served in all aspects. So it’s a sort of living story, which makes it very complicated to tell — but worthwhile.
the writer explains
Park joined US writer Jonathan Lee to help create the story for TV, with both of them bringing perspectives from the UK and the US, as the BBC drama explores what happened to both British and American victims of the tragedy.
Also Read: BBC’s Lockerbie Drama “Bombing of Pan Am 103” Is Not a Story About One Hero
The writer shares that “to every Scottish person Lockerbie means a lot to them” and that’s why it felt like “a special project” to be asked to join.
At the time I was quite young, I was only a couple of days old when the bombing happened so I don’t have any memories but you speak to people who were around then and every single person has a strong link to that night. Either them personally or their family, or they knew someone, everyone has a link to it and it just felt like this big Scottish story that really needed to be told.
Park says
The BBC drama was lucky to have many of the real people shown on screen take part in the project in some way, including investigators like Ed McCusker and Dick Marquise, and families of those who lost their lives in the attack. They all gave important insight to Park, Lee, and everyone working on the drama.
We got the chance to meet the families and speak to them and they were so incredibly generous with their time and their experiences, we couldn’t have done it without them. We wouldn’t wanted to either, but that they were so generous with such a hard subject to talk about [meant a lot]. I think, I hope, we’ve done their stories justice.
Park admits
Park adds that she and Lee always kept the families “in the back of [their] minds, and also in the front of [their] minds” while they were shaping the story.
I think that was what really struck me when I joined the project, was how dedicated everyone was to telling it sensitively and accurately. And it was a very family focused thing that we all just wanted to do their justice, they’ve given their time and they’ve gone through this again with us so we wanted to do them justice. But then also said we wanted to tell the story accurately even for the families that didn’t speak to us, and weren’t involved, because when you’re telling a true story you’re so mindful of the impact that it can have positively, negatively.
It was something she felt was incredibly important to do
So we were really, really careful not to say anything or portray anything in the wrong way, but the BBC are great with that as well, making sure that we’re not upsetting anyone unnecessarily.
Park explains that the reason for this is because the team behind the BBC series wanted to highlight those whose stories hadn’t been heard yet: “He wasn’t included in the drama because his story’s already been told.”
There’s been a lot of focus on his story, and I think that we wanted to represent all of the untold stories from the other families who we’ve maybe heard less from over the years, and have had less opportunity to to tell their story. So I think that’s why we wanted to include so much focus on other family stories and not just his.
Sky’s show was released earlier this year, which coincidentally gave the UK public two Lockerbie TV dramas to choose from. Park says the BBC team found out about the other show while they were still working on theirs, but they were so focused on telling their own story that it didn’t feel like a problem.
As we were working on it, we started hearing more about [Sky’s show], and then we realised they’re both really gonna happen at the same time. I mean, to be honest, yeah we thought about that a lot, but we were so focused on our own project, and they really don’t don’t impact each other creatively. We had such a strong idea of who we wanted to focus the story on and why we wanted to tell their story, that it really didn’t make that much of an impact on us creatively. But we were aware of [the Sky series] and it’s sort of interesting for people to compare the two, both stories are really worthwhile things to tell, and we just wanted to focus on the stories that we were telling.
What matters most to Park is that viewers get a chance to better understand the Lockerbie bombing, and she believes drama can be a powerful way to help make that happen.
It’s a way of helping people understand their own history, until I joined this project I had no idea really what was involved in the investigation, I thought I knew but I didn’t really. And I actually think that it’s really, really, really complex and really difficult to understand. We all deserve to understand our own history and I think it’s really difficult to do that when someone’s not put it all out in front of you. So it’s understandable that people are a bit confused about what happened or ‘was it right that [al-Megrahi and Lamin Khalifah Fhimah] were put to trial?’. I hope that what this drama does is puts out plainly and accurately the journey of the investigators and why they ended up putting people on trial that they did.
she said
We hope that viewers take away a better understanding of what happened. A better understanding of the very complicated investigation and also take away an insight into the journey of the families and the journey of the locals, and how there are positive stories within this really terrible disaster of people helping and trying their best.
Park adds
The good news, Park says, is that people directly affected by the bombing have shared their support for the BBC drama.
There was some really, really amazing feedback from the families and how we portrayed them. I’m not sure if I can go into specifics of their names, but I read some really amazing feedback from some of the families and the people that we portrayed. It means everything and so, even though it’s private, it was just amazing to hear that from them.
Source: Yahoo