Right at the start 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 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 Curse of Comedy season, which is dedicated to proving the truth of the cliché that underneath his make-up every clown is crying. The tightly written, imaginatively directed drama sketched the ill-fated affair of Tony Hancock and Joan Le Mesurier. Ken Stott played Hancock as having a kind of suburban charm (he sounded so like Richard Briers!) mixed with the monstrous ego of a striving performer. He was also an alcoholic and a nasty, nasty drunk. Maxine Peake as Joan wanted him to embrace domestic stability. John Le Mesurier, played by Alex Jennings, watched his wife leave him for a man he too loved.
There were some astonishing scenes and changes of tempo. Hancock was in a mess when the couple first met and in a mess at the end, but at least at the beginning he was sweet rather than self-consumed. He and Joan exchanged quiet confidences; she bolstered his self-esteem. There was a lovely, free-wheeling set of scenes where he left comedy behind for Joan's home town of Ramsgate: days on the beach in the blowy wind, an excruciatingly funny encounter with a hoity-toity landlady, happy times with Joan's son.
Hancock eventually wanted to return to what he was famous for, his frustration exacerbated by his alcoholism. The relationship turned darkly rancorous. One dinner culminated in Hancock rounding viciously on Joan's mother, calling her "a cunt". Next, he tried to throw a table through a window at the hated “Kent” lying outside. Just as a doctor had forewarned her, Joan tried to match him drink for drink. In a gruesome scene, Joan, gagging and shaking, mirrored Hancock gulp for gulp. The bottle emptied, Hancock simply produced another. She collapsed and tried to commit suicide. Joan and Hancock reunited, John Le Mesurier still stoic. Thinking Joan had rejected him (because of a series of miscommunications and family interference), Hancock died on tour in Australia; the director Richard Laxton, in a surreal interplay of colour and black and white, imagining a nightmarish, ultimately redemptive, final few hours.
