Reliving Lockerbie

‘We will know one day why it happened,’ said the mother of Helga Mosey.

‘We will know one day why it happened,’ said the mother of Helga Mosey. Helga was just 19 when she was killed in the bomb that destroyed PanAm flight 103 as it flew over the Scottish town of Lockerbie on the night of 21 December 1988. Mrs Mosey was being interviewed the day after, doorstepped at her home in the Midlands by several news teams anxious for a story, a reaction, a headline.

This week’s Archive on 4 was the first in a series, ‘A Life Less Ordinary’, which is not so much reliving history as looking back at the radio interviews, the TV reporting, the newspaper stories to examine the ways in which these very dramatic events impact on the people at their heart. How do they cope? How does it change them? And, especially, how damaging is the attention of the world’s media? It was almost like an episode of The Reunion in the way the producer, Geoff Bird, sought to analyse as well as recall the experience as he looked back through the tapes with the Mosey family and some of the journalists who had been the first on the scene in Lockerbie.