Buncefield: 20 Years On, a BBC Sounds Documentary
A personal documentary marking two decades since the Buncefield explosion, produced and narrated by Eric himself for BBC Sounds.
CLIENT
BBC Sounds
SECTOR
Broadcast · Documentary audio
SERVICES
Production · Narration · Editing · Final delivery
The brief
Eric was one of the first journalists on the scene of the Buncefield explosion in 2005. Twenty years on, the story still mattered, to the people who lived through it and to a wider audience who’d never heard the full account.
The challenge was genuinely personal as well as professional, telling a story Eric had lived through himself, twenty years later, with enough distance to reflect honestly but without losing the weight of having actually been there.
The finished piece needed to work as a genuine BBC Sounds documentary, holding an audience’s attention for its full length on the strength of the story alone.
The approach
Rather than a detached retelling, the documentary was produced and narrated personally, drawing on first-hand memory of that day alongside new interviews.
Rather than a standard news retrospective, the aim was a documentary that helped listeners understand:
- What it genuinely felt like to be one of the first people on scene
- How the town and its people actually recovered over twenty years
- Why the story still resonates with those who lived through it
- What a genuinely personal account can add that a standard news report cannot
The documentary was built specifically for BBC Sounds’ audio format, structured around personal memory and new interviews rather than archive footage alone.
Production
The project involved drawing on genuine, twenty-year-old memory alongside fresh reporting. This included:
- Structuring the documentary around personal, first-hand memory of the explosion itself
- Conducting new interviews with people connected to the event, twenty years on
- Narrating the piece personally, rather than using a separate presenter
- Balancing genuine emotional weight with the pacing a documentary audience expects
- Editing the final piece specifically for BBC Sounds’ documentary audio format
Throughout, the aim was honesty over spectacle, letting the story carry its own weight rather than dramatising an event that was already genuinely significant.
The result
The finished documentary gave BBC Sounds a genuinely distinctive piece of audio storytelling, one built on lived experience rather than research alone.
It’s the kind of project that comes from twenty years in the industry and a real personal connection to the story, not something any competitor could simply replicate by being commissioned after the fact.
By combining genuine first-hand memory with careful, honest production, the project became one of the most personally significant pieces of work on record, proof that some stories can only be told properly by someone who was actually there.
Alongside the documentary, two companion articles were published on the BBC that showcase how multimedia journalism can reach wider audiences:
🔗 Could the Buncefield disaster happen again?
🔗 Homes still being built near oil depot blast site
Why this project worked
This project shows what twenty years in the industry and a genuine personal connection to a story can produce, something no competitor could simply replicate by being commissioned to cover the same event.