In a way, the title of Bombing Brighton: The Plot to Kill Thatcher, (BBC2, Tuesday, October 8) – a one-off from the team behind the award-winning series Once Upon a Time in Northern Ireland – is a little misleading. Anyone expecting the documentary to offer a detailed account of the planning and execution of the Provisional IRA’s bombing of the Grand Hotel in Brighton in 1984, a failed attempt to assassinate British prime minister Margaret Thatcher on the final day of the Conservative Party conference, will have to look to the many earlier documentaries or books on the incident. This is not to say there isn’t a certain amount of historical scene-setting, as well as vivid recollections of the blast and the horrific sights in the hours immediately afterwards.
John Gummer, who was the Conservative Party chairman at the time and was with Thatcher when the bomb exploded, remembers the atmosphere at the conference was upbeat. “It was all just jovial,” he says, over archive footage of him and his wife Penelope, also interviewed here, messing around on the beach for the benefit of the breakfast news cameras. Remarkably, with the tensions between Thatcher and Sinn Féin/IRA still running sky high and the IRA engaged in an active bombing campaign in England, there was no feeling that this was a more dangerous conference than any previous ones.
Special Branch officer Brian McDowell, who worked undercover in intelligence-gathering in Northern Ireland, says there had been .
