EXCLUSIVE: For his BAFTA-winning 9/11 documentary Inside the President’s War Room, Adam Wishart took audiences behind the scenes to bring to life the immediate aftermath of the world’s most devastating terror attack, spotlighting the response of then-President George W. Bush and his closest confidantes.
Now, as the 20th anniversary approaches, Wishart and the BBC have turned the spotlight to the 7/7 bombings in London, but he detailed how the focus on the worst such attack to ever hit the UK capital needed to be broader, taking in multiple authorities and precincts while moving beyond the hours after the terrifying incident.
While Tony Blair, who was UK Prime Minister at the time, contributes to Wishart’s 7/7: The London Bombings, the director stressed that it was difficult to tell the story purely based on Blair and accounts from senior politicians.
“9/11 was a particular inflection point in history in which so much changed from the morning to the evening,” Wishart told Deadline. “7/7 was quite different. In a way it wasn’t possible to tell the story from Tony Blair because his role wasn’t as substantive and things weren’t changing under his feet as they were for [President] Bush [after 9/11].”
Rather than revealing reams of new information, Blair will “fit into the chorus of voices and give a sense of what it’s like to be a leader of a country facing a crisis,” Wishart added of the ex-PM’s contribution.
Memories of 7/7 remain etched in UK citizens’ minds 20 years on from that fateful day. Four co-ordinated suicide attacks were carried out by Islamist terrorists targeting commuters traveling on London’s packed public transport network during the morning rush hour, resulting in the deaths of 50 people and nearly 800 injuries. It was the UK’s deadliest terrorist incident since the 1988 bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 near Lockerbie, which is also being detailed this year in projects from Sky, the BBC and Netflix.
‘Three Weeks In July’
Wishart praised the work of doc makers like Ben Anthony who have made shows about the 7/7 survivors but said his main focus was the response of the authorities, particularly the police, not just in the resulting hours but in the resulting days. Two weeks after 7/7, there were a series of failed bomb attacks by Islamist extremists, which caused no deaths and just one minor injury. A day later, the police shot dead an innocent suspect, Jean Charles de Menezes, leading to protests, introspection over shoot-to-kill policies and fierce criticism of the Metropolitan Police.
“We called it Three Weeks In July for a while,” Wishart said of his doc. “The framing was extraordinary. Twenty years after the event was the first time we could access this because people were willing to talk about it in a way they couldn’t before. We still have survivors [in the doc] because you can’t understand what’s going on without the full 360 but we wanted to know what our public officials do in a moment of crisis.”
Wishart and the team from production outfit The Slate Works wanted to pose the wider question: “What is the purpose of public authorities?”
“If the state’s aim is to try to keep one’s citizen’s safe then clearly it failed,” he said. “And in the minutes following, what is the role of the public servant? That was the question that drove this series.”
Distrust in public authorities remains high, he added, with the shooting of de Menezes acting as a “key moment, an inflection point,” but Wishart said his doc could help humanize those at the coalface of these generational crises.
“I think as citizens it is too easy to think that public institutions are like a black box, and inside the black box are carefully engineered and beautifully honed cogs that are all whirring with great efficiency,” he added. “It is more difficult to imagine that inside these institutions are human beings who are mostly trying to do their best and sometimes have human flaws. The role of a doc maker is to try and demonstrate the humanness of these institutions and what is going on behind the front door.”
Of course, 7/7 cannot be divorced from 9/11 and Wishart stressed that his new doc “fits under the same rubric” as Inside the President’s War Room, which won a BAFTA for the BBC and Apple TV+.
Blair and the UK authorities had been on high alert since 9/11, which was ratcheted up by the 2003 Iraq War, and when 7/7 happened many felt it had been coming. “There was a London resilience plan in place and the mantra of the time was ‘not if but when’,” said Wishart.
In subsequent years, he pointed out that various plots have been thwarted, proving that the authorities learned much from the events of July 7 2005.
With next year being 20 years since the attack, Channel 4 recently premiered Shoot to Kill: Terror on the Tube about de Menezes, Netflix is making a doc titled 7/7: Hunting the London Bombers and Sky is behind 7/7: Britain’s Day of Terror. Meanwhile, a long-gestating Disney+ scripted show Suspect: The Shooting of Jean Charles de Menezes is due for launch this year, which comes from factual drama aficionado Jeff Pope.
Wishart said he won’t judge the Pope project until it’s released and noted there are some elements of 7/7 that are “hard to excavate” via documentary, such as the motivation of the bombers. But he feels docs can do just as good a job as drama at bringing events to life. “I think we’ve done a good job of the 360 and of being able to show with our lens what people were up to,” he added.
7/7: The London Bombings launches on BBC Two on Sunday January 5.
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