Last Night's TV: The Secret Peacemaker, BBC2<br />Hancock & Joan, BBC4

The man who gave peace a chance

Right at the start of The Secret Peacemaker, Peter Taylor described Brendan Duddy as "an ordinary man caught up in extraordinary events", and then spent the next hour showing what an entirely inadequate description this was. Duddy is, in fact, an extraordinary man who was largely responsible for the events. For 20 years, from 1972 to 1993, he was "the Link", the sole channel for the British Government and the IRA to talk to each other; and at key moments, when any possibility of negotiation seemed to be fading to nothing, Duddy kept the conversation going. Without him, it's unlikely the Irish peace process could ever have happened.

Duddy got into the peacemaking business through the back door, by opening a fish-and-chip shop in Derry. In the Sixties, the young Martin McGuinness was a regular visitor, delivering hamburger meat and chatting up the girls behind the counter. Duddy recalled him as "polite, innocent, absolutely non-aggressive". Any interest in politics? "Absolutely none." A sharp divergence between the public image and the close-up reality of McGuinness was confirmed by Michael Oatley, the civil servant who was Duddy's pipeline to the British Government. He thought of McGuinness as somebody who didn't enjoy getting people killed. Talking to him was like talking to "a middle-ranking British army officer from one of the tougher regiments".

Quite what transformed Duddy from neighbourhood fish-frier to Nobel Prize material wasn't satisfactorily explained, though it involved an epiphany that struck him while out hunting and turned him against killing; then again, any complete explanation would probably seem glib. When Taylor asked him at the end why he had chosen that path, Duddy cried, and could only say that he had to. However it happened, British officials and senior IRA men came together regularly at Duddy's house over tea. Duddy emphasised the importance of the informality, the trust built up by pouring cuppas and going outside to fetch coal. His neighbour, Bernadette Mount, used to chauffeur the IRA men around and sometimes put them up. She showed a faded snapshot of one of them wearing paisley pyjamas, an irony that Taylor seemed to think was funnier than it actually was.

What was most striking, though, wasn't the informality, but the role played by well-timed deceit. In the early 1990s, after Margaret Thatcher's fall had enabled a certain thawing of relations, John Major made tentative noises about peace (Duddy was insistent that Major deserves the lion's share of credit for the peace process). But twice he was forced into retreat by IRA violence. First, the mortar attack on Downing Street, then the Warrington bombing. At this crisis point, "Robert", the official who had replaced Oatley as linkman, went against orders to meet the IRA, and spoke to them of a British recognition that a united Ireland was inevitable. Meanwhile, the British Government received a letter, purportedly from McGuinness, stating that the conflict was over; in effect, an admission of defeat. The letter was forged, and it seems likely Robert deliberately misrepresented each side to the other in order to keep them talking; Duddy did not confirm this, but did say that he regarded Robert as a hero. He himself was put in serious danger when the IRA suspected he had written the letter, and interrogated him for four hours solid.

It was a puzzling story, full of lacunae and curious moments, such as Duddy weeping over a message sent to him by the dying Bobby Sands, leader of the H-block hunger strikers, written on toilet paper. It felt like a detailed footnote to a bigger story that hasn't yet been properly told. But it was perpetually intriguing, and ultimately inspiring. What's that line? Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called sons of God?

Hancock & Joan was the latest contribution to BBC4's slightly bizarre Curse of Comedy season, which is dedicated to proving the truth of the cliché that underneath his make-up every clown is crying. Unfortunately, proving a cliché is true is not the same thing as making it seem fresh or interesting. This drama followed the doomed romance between Tony Hancock and Joan Le Mesurier, wife of John, which started when Hancock was already pretty far gone as an alcoholic, and was brought to an end by his suicide. Ken Stott and Alex Jennings played Hancock and Le Mesurier, neither of them looking remotely the part, but both managing at times to evoke them quite beautifully. I especially liked Jennings's impression of that self-depreciating wave of the hand Le Mesurier did: such a distinctive gesture, but so hard to pin down, a matter of angle and speed that you could never measure. Maxine Peake was cast against type as respectable Joan, and didn't get much chance to bring her natural charm to bear. But the real problem was a script riddled with yet more cliché – Joan telling Hancock, "You're not how I thought you'd be at all" – and a creepy, empty feeling had less to do with expressing Hancock's miserable soul than with BBC4's customary microscopic budget. And, personally, I'd rather concentrate on my comic heroes being funny.