Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic Unlock the Editor’s Digest for freeRoula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.It’s fast becoming a British TV tradition to bring the festive period to a close with a sobering drama about real-life tragedy or scandal. January 2022 began with Anne, about the 1989 Hillsborough football stadium disaster, and last year’s Mr Bates vs The Post Office, about the wrongful conviction of British sub-postmasters in the 2000s, sparked national outrage and new legislation. Now it is the turn of a five-part mini-series chronicling the aftermath of the 1988 Lockerbie bombing, which brought dow: to date the UK’s deadliest terrorist attack. While tonally and thematically comparable to the previous shows, Lockerbie: A Search for Truth tells a story in which it is far less clear what is right and just, and the attempt to shed light yields competing truths and conflicting beliefs. It is a series that will inevitably stir strong emotions and reawaken old disputes. Don’t expect the unified public response that Mr Bates elicited.Like Alan Bates, however, the truth-seeker at the heart of Lockerbie is a conscientious man who channels his own suffering into a wider crusade. As played by Colin Firth, Jim Swire is a doctor who leads a tireless campaign to ensure that those responsible for killing his daughter and 269 others are held to account.Having been instrumental in securing a trial for the primary suspects, Swire spends years challenging the validity of official accounts and court verdicts pertaining to the catastrophe. For many of the bereaved families — some of whom have already decried this single-perspective series — his continued questioning of the evidence used to convict Libyan national Abdel Basset al-Megrahi in 2001 is tantamount to denying them closure. But Lockerbie portrays Swire less as a wilful contrarian or conspiracist than as a well-intentioned man who cannot stomach the idea that the justice delivered may be illusionary or ill-gotten. And while the show is clearly invested in his scepticism over al-Megrahi’s involvement — and attendant suspicions that the UK and US scapegoated Muammer Gaddafi’s Libya — it also takes pains to frame his investigation as an obsession born of unprocessed grief.Firth is superb in a role that requires him to be at once resilient and broken, restrained and raging, devoted to a dead daughter and increasingly detached from his family. Catherine McCormack is also moving as Swire’s wife Jane, who laments both a lost child and an absent husband. In the show’s standout scene, Jane asks a platitude-proffering MP to count out the 15 seconds her daughter was conscious as she fell from the sky to her death.Director Otto Bathurst shoots that hellish night when aeroplane debris and bodies rained down on a sleepy Scottish town with visceral immediacy. After that initial jolt, the show can seem slightly underpowered and overwritten, its dense script laden with stilted dialogue and awkward exposition about thorny legal issues and intricate Middle Eastern politics. Those who make it to the conclusion will find few answers waiting for them. “Maybe the only truth is we’ll never know what really happened,” Jane tells her husband, worn down by decades of fruitless searching. It’s a heartbreaking realisation, but perhaps, the show suggests, a liberating one too.★★★☆☆Sky Atlantic, January 2, 9pm and streaming on NOW in the UK thereafter. On Peacock in the US
