Return to Lockerbie with Lorraine Kelly, ITV1, review: A reminder that Kelly is more than morning TV

Lorraine Kelly had never looked back after reporting on the devastating aftermath of the Lockerbie bombing on 21 December, 1988 – the deadliest terrorist attack in UK history, which claimed 270 lives.

The disaster brought Kelly, previously a junior reporter at ITV, to national prominence. Within weeks, she had moved from Scotland to London, where her straight-talking presenting style won the enduring respect of audiences. Lockerbie was both a great schism in her life, and the moment her career took off.

Thirty-five years later, Kelly finally made that overdue pilgrimage back to the Scottish town for the moving, gripping and often upsetting documentary Return to Lockerbie with Lorraine Kelly. The presenter wanted to discover how the bombing by Libyan terrorists of Pan Am Flight 103 had affected the community (11 locals died when sections of the plane crashed into residential areas).

She was also determined to interrogate her own emotions about the atrocity. “It is quite difficult to equate the fact that I got my big break from something so awful,” she said. “There’s a bit of guilt there.”

In 1988, PTSD was an alien concept, she observed. Locals who woke to find the bodies of victims in their gardens and on their roofs were expected to just get on with it. As was Kelly.

“It was the stiff upper lip cliché,” she said as she watched old footage of herself reporting from a field where part of the cockpit of the Boeing 747 had landed. “If I had broken down that would have been unacceptable… you didn’t show emotion.”

Lockerbie residents were on the same emotional journey. One man blinked away tears as he recalled opening his front door to find the body of a young student who had been flying from London back to the US in his garden. Every year, he puts a wreath out in her memory.

“People who should have been asking for help didn’t,” said another local. “Quite a lot of people found that alcohol helped. There seemed to be an awful lot of that about. A lot of children started bed wetting.”

Kelly had been haunted by dreams of Lockerbie in the intervening decades and her guilt was part of the reason she had never returned. “I don’t feel I’m allowed to have PTSD,” she said. “I was just a reporter there. That’s my brain dealing with something so horrendous I’ve been pushing it away for 35 years.”

She was concerned that the film might be too focused on her experience and that she might come across as self-involved. But despite the prominence of her name in the title, Kelly made an effort to open the floor to the community and the victims’ families.

She interviewed Renée Boulanger, whose sister, Nicole, had died on the flight and whose mother, Jeannine, had broken down before TV cameras in 1988. “Back in the 80s you didn’t talk about that stuff. If you did you were kind of shunned,” said Renée, who also avoided visiting Lockerbie for decades but found that coming to Scotland and the scene of her sister’s death had helped her achieve peace.

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There could be no happy ending to this tragic story. Nevertheless, there was a slightly positive skew to the film. Just like Kelly, Renée was learning to speak about her experiences and to be honest about her feelings of bereavement and anguish.

The human spirit can survive even the darkest traumas, said Return to Lockerbie, and it is important to go on living while honouring the memory of the dead.

“One thing that has really struck me coming back was how this community has healed itself. That’s such a testament to their strength,” said Kelly. It was a powerful conclusion to a moving film about grief, survival and the long road to closure.