'I watched Lockerbie TV show as a victim's relative and thought it was disgusting tragedy porn'

dailyrecord.co.uk:

A new series about the Lockerbie disaster has been described as “tragedy porn” by a surviving relative of one of the victims.Mary Lou Ciulla found out about the death of her husband Frank while cooking dinner as a news flash revealed the Pan Am flight 103 had crashed.He was one of 270 people on the flight who died after a bomb on board exploded.Her daughter, Michelle Ciulla Lipkin, was just 17 at the time and was called home from school as the family began a search for answers to what had happened.Lipkin, a spokesperson for the Victims of Pan Am Flight 103 group, had liaisede closely with producers at Carnival about the historical accuracy of the drama, but says that Lockerbie’s graphic depiction of the disaster was a shock.In its opening scenes, the series imagines passengers joining together in a singalong of Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer before an explosion rips through the cabin.Debris reigned down on Lockerbie residents.

Those who scrambled to assess what has fallen from the night sky found the bodies of passengers, gruesomely lit under the glare of their torches.“I looked at my Mom and I was like, ‘It’s tragedy porn.

This is disgusting,’” Lipkin said. “They’re literally representing the worst moments of our life … The amount of bodies they showed and the egregious nature of it becoming like an action movie with things coming out of the sky.

You don’t need to do that.”Lipkin says Sky and Peacock made a “very deliberate choice” to dramatise the crash and, although producers were honest and transparent about their intentions, the “re-traumatisation” of the scenes was troubling.In a memo sent to other victims, she recommended skipping the first episode and later recaps.“We had lots of good conversations, but it was