Peter Conchie's Television Review

ALMOST AS soon as it began, it occurred to me that the unbearably moving Everyman: Surviving Lockerbie (BBC1), would be one of those precious programmes which I'd probably never forget.

Michelle Ciulla was 17 in 1988, the year her father died when a Pan Am flight from London to New York exploded, leaving wreckage and bodies over 850 square miles in and around Lockerbie. Hugh and Margaret Connell found the body of her father, Frank, in a remote field on their farm just 20 minutes after the crash, he was still strapped into his seat. They cared for the body until the police arrived, and referred to him simply as "our boy" until they discovered the man's identity six months later. When the Connells eventually met Michelle, Margaret observed: "You're so like your Dad."

This deep sense of intimacy permeated the film and there was even a certain incongruous beauty which arose, like a phoenix, from the impact. With healing lyricism, the townspeople talked of "flames rolling up from Lockerbie", wrought-iron gates melting into a "beautiful blue pool of metal" and the gentle sound of windows "popping". This vivid description of an appalling night is typical of the community's reaction to the tragedy; a coping mechanism, undoubtedly, but also a reflection of their bottomless depths of humanity.

The film was about being forced to confront the unthinkable, about realities being redefined, about the world being taken apart and then grotesquely reassembled. A priest opened his front door to find the road no longer there, a ball of fire in its place; a daughter arrived home to find her mother prone and weeping; a driver was later tormented by the thought of exactly what caused his bumpy ride home.

The most disturbing aspect was not the irresistible thought of loved ones who might, at this moment, be hanging just as precariously in the air. Neither was it a single image, or even one of the terrible accounts from volunteer rescuers. None of these things. It was a sound. A dreadful, primal howl of anguish issuing from a woman who arrived at JFK airport to find that her baby was dead. As an aural definition of grief it was terrifying.

Although the FBI officially begs to differ, Saturday's Storyville (BBC2) entitled "Waco: Rules of Engagement" recounted their involvement in another American tragedy. According to the official inquiry into the tragedy at Mount Carmel, Waco in which 76 Branch Davidians burnt to death, there was no conspiracy to kill. David Koresh and his followers killed themselves. What a crock, as they might say in America. William Gazecki's glowering, towering cross-examination indicted and exposed as liars the very people who run the most powerful country in the world.

His technique was one of juxtaposition, cleverly weaving interviews from the inquiry with news footage and recordings of the forked- tongued negotiators who, with Orwellian double-speak, helped to mislead a frightened group of naive people. There was one extraordinary exchange in which Koresh was told by a negotiator - Jim was his name - that there were no guns on the helicopters which had circled the camp during the first attack. When challenged, Jim admitted that, well, come to mention it, there were guns, and, yes, they were fired. What Jim meant was they weren't mounted guns, slung onto the outside of the choppers Vietnam-style. His climbdown was played over footage of a man in the distance being killed by a bullet fired from a helicopter.

"It's kind of like getting into a fight with a couple of next-door neighbours," the eloquent Koresh observed. "The little brother comes over and whips you and the big brother comes over to investigate." Big Brother indeed. As Koresh was shown wincing on his bed proudly displaying his bullet wounds like a modern-day Travis Bickle, the FBI were just outside the window, driving around in tanks.

The FBI's technique was psychological. Powerful lights were shone onto the compound at night in an attempt to drive an undoubtedly unstable man mad. Tapes of rabbits being slaughtered were piped across the compound - coupled as it was with Nancy Sinatra on repeat, this would be enough to break the will of most men.

Gazecki's film revealed him as a man with something important to say about the deranged democracy which is America. And boy, did he say it.