Television - Andrew Billen on a BBC series focusing coolly on a spot that's still too hot

Endgame in Ireland (BBC2, Sundays, 8pm) is too guileless a piece of work to go in for all-encompassing metaphors, visual or otherwise. But it could have done worse than make something overarching of the confessions of the loyalist paramilitary Michael Stone. Stone had been deputed to turn up at the funerals of the three IRA men killed by the SAS in Gibraltar and bump off Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness.

In programme one of Norma Percy's terrific series for Brook Lapping, Stone, who these days looks like a short-order chef on Crossroads, described how he had arrived at the cemetery laden with grenades and handguns, and had planned to assassinate the republican leaders with two brisk shots as they passed the roll of honour. "That was their Cenotaph, and that's where they were going to die." His view was suddenly obscured, however. He threw a grenade instead and missed.

Blocked vision is these programmes' unspoken theme. None of the key participants interviewed so brilliantly turns out to have had a clear view of anything. In some cases, such as Lady Thatcher's, what got in the way was their own obtuseness. Her mind jangling with comparisons with no surrender in the Falklands, she could not understand what Northern Ireland's Catholics were complaining about. "The Irish are used to movements of population. If the Northern population want to be in the south, why don't they just move there?" she asked her Cabinet Office deputy. David Goodall realised, horrified, that she was referring to Cromwell.

According to Douglas Hurd, the Unionists were rarely in a state of greater enlightenment. Ian Paisley went nuclear at the setting up of the Anglo-Irish "Conference" because he was unable to appreciate that, in return for a small involvement in the affairs of the north, the south was relinquishing all claims on it. "The Unionists never understood when they were winning," Hurd complained. Whether Dr Paisley was purblind or merely pretending to be hardly mattered, however, when the audiences for his rants included suckers such as Johnny Adair. Interviewed while out of jail on licence, Adair wore for his moments of fame a ski-cap and a black WWF-style leotard from which heaved a massive cleavage. He had, he told us, been much taken with Paisley's "blood and thunder" speeches.

On the other side, for his reminiscences, Martin McGuinness wore a woolly pullover, but failed to come across quite as cuddly as, I suspect, he had hoped. Because he was intent on turning Sinn Fein into a credible force at the ballot box, he had regarded the 1987 Enniskillen bombing as a "total and absolute disaster": "I was absolutely gutted. I felt this would be damaging to our strategy of trying to build Sinn Fein as a political party." Whether or not we believe he was quite so out of it as not to know what the IRA high command was planning to do with Colonel Gaddafi's kindly donated war kitty, the gutting was rather more absolute for those whom his hot-headed comrades had assassinated that Poppy Day.

The other participants - who next week will include Bill Clinton - tend to wear sensible suits and ties. At the time they wore the same, although they might as well have been wearing sweaters over their heads, given the yards of wool pulled over their eyes. The SDLP's John Hume, for instance, was left to read in the Observer that, all the time he was informing Downing Street of his talks with Adams, the British government was secretly meeting the IRA off its own bat. John Major, meanwhile, believed the IRA's "the war is over message" was genuine. It wasn't. It was the literary endeavour of an MI5 officer called Fred.

But, if everyone was duping everyone else, how much more in the dark were we who followed the sorry saga of Northern Ireland from what we read and saw in the media. With more than some justification, the Endgame in Ireland team, who were also responsible for The Death of Yugoslavia, see themselves as historians, not journalists. They keep in the occasional dig at the journalists of the day. A camera crew filmed Peter Brooke's big speech on Ireland but missed his crucial concession about Britain having no "selfish strategic or economic interest" in Ulster. The Lobby correspondents bought the line that after the mortar attack on Major's cabinet, the meeting continued within minutes. "That was one way of putting it," deadpanned Charles Powell, who admitted Major and he had scuttled to a shelter.

At first, while watching, I wondered if this series was too dispassionate for its own good, and feared it risked looking as laconic as its smugger participants. I now think the usual portentous emotiveness with which TV covers Ireland would have ruined it. "For the first time, the whole story makes sense," the makers claim, extravagantly but correctly. The only problem with their cool historical approach is that Northern Ireland has not yet cooled itself, nor become history. The second of its four parts was shown on 1 July, the day of David Trimble's resignation. Irish politics may be a game, but we are not at its end.

Andrew Billen is a staff writer on the London Evening Standard

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