It was one of those ‘I remember exactly where I was when I heard…’ days. On 7 July 2005, 52 people, including Jewish victims Miriam Hyman, 31, Susan Levy, 53, and Anat Rosenberg, 39, were killed when three trains and a bus were blown up in London. Hundreds were injured. Another series of attempted bombings followed and in the subsequent manhunt, the police shot dead an innocent man – Jean Charles de Menezes.
Twenty years later, producer and former JFS teacher Neil Grant is behind a new BBC documentary on the first suicide bombings on English soil. He says he wants viewers to understand exactly what it was like when four bombs exploded on London’s transport system on 7 July 2005.
Pic: Courtesy BBC
7/7: The London Bombings is a new series of four hour-long programmes telling the story of the biggest police investigation in British history and the three-week hunt to catch all the bombers. The series follows the investigation forensically and painstakingly, minute by minute, hour by hour, day by day and includes interviews with then Prime Minister Tony Blair, Metropolitan Police Commissioner Sir Ian Blair, then Home Secretary Charles Clarke, together with key members of the police investigation team. The hard-to-watch documentary series also features survivors, bereaved parents and first responders.
Neil Grant. Pic: BBC
Simon Young, BBC Head of Commissioning, History, says: “It’s difficult to comprehend just how febrile and frenzied those weeks felt like in London and across the country, nearly twenty years ago. This series painstakingly pieces together the chain of events, moments of resilience and hope, as well as tragedy and horror. The result is a frank portrait of how the nation responded, when our streets became a new kind of frontline.”
Neil has been “making telly for the last 35 years”. He says his work always deals with huge complex issues and this involved trying to “put together as a matter of historical record, an event that touched so many people, particularly in London, and had an immense impact, politically as well as emotionally, thereafter.”
He and his team started by essentially unpicking the police response to a major terrorist event that happened in London so many years ago. “We wanted to get viewers back into the moment, to understand exactly what it was like, reliving that bubble, bringing them back all those years that had so much impact on so many people’s lives.
Pic: BBC
“You can bring a completely new audience to storytelling by actually immersing them back into those moments, which has an extraordinary ability to re-engage people.”
He wants viewers to feel “emotionally engaged and emotionally affected. And if I am too that means that that’s a story important and worth telling.”
Pic: BBC
Adam Wishart, joint series director says: “After telling the story of President George W Bush on 9/11, we wanted to understand what happened to the British state when faced with a huge crisis of its own. What does it feel like to run the police or the country, when faced with the biggest attack on English soil? And what is it like when you or your family are caught in the blasts? How does anyone cope with the emotional consequences and the political repercussions?”
Neil is well aware that the new 7/7 documentary “is going to raise the spectre of Islamophobia, because, of course, the terrorists responsible were Muslim. I think that we have to tread very, very carefully and have to be very, very sensitive. When you’re making this sort of film, you’re mindful of the impact that it has. There is a responsibility that we have as filmmakers to draw attention to those situations that are controversial, that need to be unpicked, but to be mindful of the consequences that might have on the respective communities.
He adds: “And that’s the lesson, because in many respects, we within the Jewish community have had to put up with a hell of a year. I’m mindful of the reaction that people have towards us as Jews as a consequence of what we are fighting for and believing as a consequence of October 7th.”
In an article for industry bible Broadcast on 8 November 2023, a month after the deadly Hamas attacks in Israel on 7 October, Grant “issued a plea for understanding” as antisemitic incidents soared across the UK.
At the time, he said that the BBC “tied themselves in knots to avoid describing the group of attackers who killed innocent civilians, terrorists. Compounded as it was by John Simpson’s insensitive defence of the BBC’s initial position, I couldn’t even count on the state broadcaster to do the right thing.”
Composite of handout images of (left to right) 7/7 bombers, Hasib Hussain, Shehzad Tanweer, Jermaine Lindsay and Mohammad Sidique Khan, which were shown at the inquest into the bombings. Pic provided by BBC.
Fourteen months later, once again commenting on what it’s like being Jewish within the television industry, he says he thinks Jewish members of staff at the BBC are “extremely beleaguered. And I think that it has been extraordinary year for Jewish members of staff, as well as inside the BBC, outside the BBC”.
For his next project Grant would “love to make a film about about how our community itself feels extraordinarily threatened; to make a film about contemporary anti-Semitism.” In an ideal world, he’d also “like to make an observational documentary about Trump”.
The tales he has told are “difficult stories, but they need to be confronted by a matter of historical record. I, as a filmmaker and as a documentary filmmaker, have a responsibility to bring them to the widest possible audience, and that means they need to be journalistically and factually accurate. And if that means then that I push my team to ensure and to deliver on that, then that’s a job well done.”
All episodes of 7/7: The London Bombings are available to watch on BBC iPlayer
