Lockerbie Pan Am 103 – Tracking the Evolving Re-Use of Archive Broadcast News

This article will examine the changing ways in which the original broadcast news footage of the bombing of Pan Am 103 over Lockerbie in December 1988 has been re-used. The article reflects on evolving types of usage from the immediacy of contemporaneous news coverage through several other stages: as evidence in investigative current affairs documentary films; as documentary history presenting the contexts of this event; in creative memorials commemorating the lives of the victims; as witness testimony recording the reflections in hindsight of those who experienced the disaster; and most recently in scripted dramatisations. The article explores how the re-use of this news footage can be viewed within the conceptual framework of the creative practice of ‘archiveology’ (Russell, 2018) and argues that this archival re-use has built up many interconnected layers of collective memory about what happened over Lockerbie that night.