The telephone rings at the Swires' Oxfordshire home on 22 December 1988: Flora, their eldest, was on the New York-bound flight that scattered wreckage across southern Scotland. From that moment Colin Firth plays Jim Swire as a man unable to accept official certainties, travelling from a Lockerbie church hall to the UN, Tripoli and a Dutch courtroom, amassing boxes of documents that contradict every assurance given to the bereaved. Across five hour-long episodes, David Harrower’s script sticks to the timeline Swire and Peter Biddulph set down in their 2021 memoir, showing how a quiet scientist becomes an irritant to successive governments and, later, a lone visitor to the convicted Libyan he believes is innocent.
Sky Atlantic’s co-production with Peacock keeps the palette wintry and the tone procedural; directors Otto Bathurst and Jim Loach shoot drab hotel corridors and fluorescent tribunal rooms as places where truth is rationed rather than revealed. Catherine McCormack’s Jane Swire watches her husband’s obsession hollow out their family life, while Ardalan Esmaili gives the imprisoned Abdelbaset al-Megrahi a courteous opacity that fuels Jim’s doubts. The series ends in 2014 with the empty chair Megrahi once occupied and a pile of unanswered letters to MPs, refusing the catharsis it has spent five hours arguing can never come.
Released on 2 January 2025, the drama won Best Scripted Series at the 2025 British Academy Scotland Awards, yet some victim relatives accused the production of reheating pain for prestige television. The charge sticks because the programme offers no new evidence, only the spectacle of Firth’s face registering each incremental betrayal. That face, photographed in tight close-up as he pores over flight manifests and faded boarding passes, is the series’ most damning exhibit.
Production Details
Sky Atlantic / 1 Season / 5 Episodes / 2025
Created by: David Harrower
Showrunner(s): Oskar Slingerland, Kirsten Sheridan, Liz Trubridge
Writer(s): David Harrower
Producer(s): Brian Kaczynski
Music: Rupert Gregson-Williams
Main Cast
Colin Firth as Jim Swire
Catherine McCormack as Jane Swire
Ardalan Esmaili as Abdelbaset Al Megrahi
Sam Troughton as Murray Guthrie
Jemma Carlton as Cathy Swire
Harry Redding as William Swire
Simon Delaney as Bert Ammerman
Darren Strange as Reverend John Mosey
Maxine Evans as Lisa Mosey
Pauline Goldsmith as Pamela Dix
Selwa Jghalef as Aisha Megrahi
Claire Brown as Ellen Walker
