Piper Alpha

Drama on 3: Piper Alpha

July 18th, 2008 by Steve Bowbrick

In quiet corners of the BBC remarkable things happen. Here’s an example from Radio 3. It’s a play, written by Stephen Phelps (a veteran of investigative TV) about the Piper Alpha disaster that tells the story of the critical ninety minutes from the first failure to the final explosion, in real time, twenty years after the disaster—to the second. As an experiment I think it’s a total success. Tense, moving and terrifying: high octane stuff, structured like a movie. It’s genuinely spine-tingling and left me thinking about it for a long time after it had finished (MP3).

And thanks to the people who offered copies of the programme from their archives in response to my appeal.

Producer: Toby Swift
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Piper Alpha’s Legacy

July 17th, 2008 by Steve Bowbrick

It seems to be my job to bring you the heartbreaking stuff round here (I think I’d like to switch to the cheery shift). This is an excellent programme about the Piper Alpha oil platform disaster, in which 167 men lost their lives twenty years ago. What’s fascinating is that the most affecting stories are not those of the survivors or the bereaved but those of the secondary characters: the hospital chaplain, the helicopter pilot… The measured contribution of the oil company’s PR—whose job was to tell the media what was going on out in the North Sea that night—is somehow more moving for its detachment (MP3).

This show went out as part of the Radio 4 Choice podcast, which is definitely worth signing up for. I was also interested to read that Radio 3’s contribution to the programmes marking the anniversary of Piper Alpha was a ‘real-time drama‘ set on that terrible night that went out on 6 July but I missed it and, obviously, it’s now been replaced by the following week’s drama so it’s gone for good. Do drop me a line if you saved a copy. It would be great to feature it here.

There is plenty of video relating to Piper Alpha at bbc.co.uk too: a news piece from 1988, interviews with survivors and widows, and a piece about the anniversary,

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