19.45   LOCKERBIE
A NIGHT REMEMBERED
Next month it will be ten years since Pan Am flight 103 bound for New York from London Heathrow crashed at Lockerbie claiming eleven people from the town and the lives of all 259 passengers and crew. Tonight on Channel 4, the ordinary people of this tiny Scottish town recall the extraordinary events of the evening of December 21st 1998 when Britain's biggest mass murder was to happen literally on their doorstep. Simplicity and understatement mark their story telling and the magnitude of this human tragedy. For the anniversary, the people of Lockerbie remember it so 'like Omagh' and other atrocities it 'should never happen again.'

In Lockerbie - A Night Remembered, these normally media-wary people speak in their own words of the horrific events and heroic efforts that took place on that fateful night approaching Christmas almost a decade ago. It is powerful personal testimony - some of which has never been heard before. In this atmospheric documentary researched and filmed over a period of six months, the intensely private community of Lockerbie open up to celebrate the rescue efforts of the living and commemorate the dead.

Today normal service may have resumed in Lockerbie. People still wander down to the bingo hall, haggle at sheep markets or tend to their farms as they did back then. But scratch the surface and all the signs of one of the world's biggest air disasters still remain. Time has eased some of the trauma for the residents and aid workers who helped at the scene but flashbacks are common. Memories of the plane exploding, 'flames rolling, boiling', the shock, the aftermath, the carnage, the valiant rescue attempts and the post traumatic stress that changed this town forever are still vividly clear today.

Farmer HUGH CONNELL said: "We could see the plane, rolling, boiling up into the sky and then we heard noises all around us. It was difficult to judge where they were coming from in the darkness. It was a windy night and the pheasants were beginning to cackle in the woods. It sounded like bombs going off like thump, thump, thump in the darkness. We moved out into the fields and there were pieces every where ..Dean still thought it was a cargo plane and then we came across a girl's shoes and belongings and then we realised it must have been a passenger plane... Then in the moonlight he (his son) had come across a seat with a body still strapped in it... he was dead.

"We searched a wee bit further, back towards the house because they we knew we needed help but we had no phone. All the phones around us had been cut off and the electric was off and it was then I think we realised how remote we were. We always enjoyed loneliness and quietness up here. But that night we seemed so far away from help and so far from everybody... Then we set off across the fields with the land rover and were coming up against one piece of wreckage after an other... Pieces of the plane were one thing but luggage was another because every name you read you knew you were looking at somebody's life that had been halted - some family broken up."

There is not one adult inhabitant of Lockerbie who does not remember where they were and what they were doing that 'Silent Night' approaching Christmas. It was a normal day with normal routines. Housewives recall how they were preparing for supper or for Christmas that evening when just after 7 pm the Pan Am jet disappeared from the radar screen. Another couple, JANE GIBSON and her husband, were returning from a festive party in London. They remember when they heard on hastily prepared radio bulletins the devastating news. No words, they say, can describe their journey back, the fear for friends and relatives and their desperate hunt for news.

In a couple of minutes everything normal in Lockerbie was turned upon its head. The explosion ripped through houses, left a huge fuselage in gardens were children used to play and sent Sherwood Avenue up 'like an atomic mushroom.' The town's population increased from 3,500 to 10,000 overnight. Local people did what they could to assist in the rescue operation, providing food, shelter and comfort for grief stricken relatives in a foreign country.

For every story there are a hundred others but among the most poignant is that of a young mother with two children who lived in New York with her husband. He was an executive with an international firm who regularly held conferences overseas. His wife was determined that this Christmas he would remain with his family but her husband insisted on going to boost his career.

"So for the weeks prior to the conference they argued together. But no he was determined - work came first and then on the night he was due to fly out for the last time his wife pleaded with him not to go, but no, he was going. In the morning the taxi came to run him to the airport and he put his arms around his wife to kiss her goodbye but she pushed him away. That fact probably festers in that woman's brain and today is something she will never be able to come to terms with."

Director Michael Grigsby sets these harrowing stories and moments against startling landscape, shots of darkened winter skies, scattered cattle and telephone polls to create a sense of Lockerbie's isolation - a massive catastrophe happening to ordinary people in an entirely inappropriate, cut off place.