Lyra, Channel 4 review — an elegiac reflection on journalist Lyra McKee

Lyra McKee was such an open and engaging storyteller that it is only fitting that she tell her own story, even after her death. Lyra, a documentary airing on Channel 4, is built around voice memos, videos, interviews and articles by the Northern Irish journalist up to April 2019, when she was fatally shot by a sectarian extremist group while covering a riot in Londonderry, also known as Derry. The result is a tribute that feels both personal and vital — as much an introduction to an extraordinary person as it is an elegiac reflection on a life violently cut short.

These fragments have been carefully pieced together by director Alison Millar, who describes McKee as having been “like a daughter”. That intimacy is evident throughout the feature which also captures, but never exploits, the sorrow of McKee’s family members and their love for their child, sister, aunt and partner. In one clip from 2008 (when she was just 18) we hear McKee talk about how she’d been a preternaturally curious girl, constantly asking her mother “why?”. Now we see how that question continues to tear at those closest to her.

While there are anguished moments, the film is committed to celebrating and continuing McKee’s work. The extracts spotlight what made her an exemplary journalist, both rigorous and compassionate. They also illuminate the social issues she investigated and campaigned for, from LGBT+ rights and the PTSD of her post-ceasefire generation to the working classes cut adrift from the tide of late-1990s optimism.

We hear McKee acknowledge the risks she takes in her work, but her sense of responsibility to “talk about all the dark, nasty things that happened and are happening” outweighs any fears of being caught up in them. “I’m a cockroach, you can’t kill me,” she says in an interview a year before her death. The words have a painful and prophetic resonance. Through Lyra her personality is beautifully preserved, her aims and ideas transmitted to us viewers.

★★★★☆

On Channel 4 from April 15 at 9.25pm, then available on All4

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