It's been a while since I saw it, but I thought it was pretty typical of that programme. Devious and agenda driven, it follows the same template every time. Concentrate on the more far fetched claims, wave away the most sensible ones with a sentence, [....] then we get into the last 10 minutes, were a load of cherry picked 'experts' demolish the whole thing as the wild ravings of conspiracy theoriests.
I have to confess I was present while it was on, but I wasn't paying attention so I can't really comment. (Probably chatting on the forum at the same time!) However, I've seen enough of these programmes to recognise the formula and you're spot on. The first three quarters builds up a big spooky pile of suspicion, not always very plausibly, then in the last ten to 15 minutes some "experts" just hand-wave the whole thing away.
The success of this depends on the evidence, of course. If you're talking "9/11 was an inside job" then it's not hard to do, and do it well. On the other hand, the formula depends on the basic assumption that every conspiracy theory is baseless nonsense, so it doesn't work so well if there are genuine questions.
Was this the one were the transvestite messiah himself David shayler popped up to rubbish the whole thing or was that the Lockerbie one?
That was indeed the Lockerbie one, which I've watched two or three times. That was probably the programme's most inglorious hour. In the first section, some things were stated as fact which are most certainly not fact at all, but even so, they couldn't entirely help putting over the impression that they convicted the wrong guys and there was something deeply questionable going on. Then for the debacle, all they could do was wheel on
David Shayler to announce that he was an MI5 insider who knew about these things, and take it from him, it's fine, they framed the guy because they really knew he did it, honest.
After seeing that, no, I don't trust that programme even when it seems plausible. (They had quite a good one on the Kennedy assassination I recall, but even so, the dishonesty of the Lockerbie one taints the whole concept.)
Rolfe.
[The detail on the Lockerbie one which I remember as most dishonest was that they wheeled on the inscrutable Bogomira Erac to explain how she saved a printout of the baggage loading record for Pan Am 103A from Frankfurt to Heathrow as a personal souvenir, which turned out to be the only piece of evidence remaining after every other copy of the baggage records for that airport on that day vanished completely within a few days of the incident. She stated that "it turned out that the printout showed that an unaccompanied bag had travelled in on a flight from Malta that morning", and that was presented as indisputed fact. The problem is that the printout shows nothing of the sort, and the trial court's finding that it did is one of the major stitch-up points of the whole saga.]