A Course Called Ireland review – why did Bill Murray ever agree to this Irish golf show?

A Course Called Ireland is a new documentary in which Bill Murray golfs his way around the “Emerald Isle” while reflecting on everything from his great-grandmother to worms. The heart leaps. Bill Murray? The same Bill Murray whose genius for wounded obnoxiousness was so beautifully deployed in Groundhog Day and Lost in Translation? Yes, the same Bill Murray.

A montage of coming attractions does little to dampen the ardour. Here is the 76-year-old actor teeing off amid the gasp-inducing greenery of County Kerry. Here he is squinting at the “hardworking Irish worms” that stripe the fairways of coastal Cork. And here he is saying “hah-hah” in a variety of other golf-adjacent locations while surrounded by locals whose body language suggests that they, too, are in the process of saying, or at least thinking, “hah-hah”. We ready our jaws for the cavalcade of bittersweet guffaws that will inevitably follow.

But what’s this? A shadow has fallen across the opening moments of episode one and from a darkened doorway steps a pensioner in a quilted raincoat. This is Margaret, a small Irishwoman who bumps into Murray (“You were in the Ghostbusters!”) during his visit to the harbour town of Cobh and, for reasons that presumably involved the phrases “local colour” and “cheaper than hiring a professional”, is subsequently employed to narrate the first episode. Can Margaret’s chuckling befuddlement compensate for her inexperience? No, she’s terrible. Still, she is here now so we may as well let her get on with it. “This series is not about golf,” she shouts over footage of a golf course. “And it’s not really about Bill Murray,” she adds over footage of Murray.

What is it about, Margaret? It’s “about the Irish”, she says, uncertainly. “Sort of.” And it is about the Irish. Sort of. But it’s not what the series is really about. A Course Called Ireland is really about what happens when a TV production implodes like a machine-gunned meringue because it has hired a celebrity who doesn’t want to do what he has been hired to do. It is also about what happens when producers, sensing calamity, allow said celebrity’s seeming waywardness to dictate the tone of the production, then get frustrated with the results and overcompensate with an effortful “quirkiness” and a soundtrack of theme-pub fiddles so hysterical it appears for ever on the brink of Riverdancing itself off the nearest cliff.

The awfulness begins in County Cork, with a largely uncommunicative Murray driving around various golf courses and pubs with his friend – and author of the book on which this six-part travelogue is based – Tom Coyne. Murray doesn’t want to do what the producers want him to do. This includes discussing the history of Irish storytelling (“It’s not the fucking Bill Murray show”) and walking up a staircase (“No”). I assume these huffs have been left in the edit as an explanation/excuse for the subsequent arse-over-tittery. “Look what we’ve had to put up with!” is the subtext, a cry for help that would be more stirring had anyone from the production company bothered to type the words “Bill Murray reputation for prickliness” into Google before they signed him. But no. And so we must endure innumerable near-silent car journeys, golf-course longueurs, strained encounters with local eccentrics and Margaret’s increasingly desperate efforts to pretend everything’s tickety-boo (“just try to enjoy yourselves!”), all of which is punctuated by the eyerolls of a man who gives the impression of wishing to be anywhere else.

There are brief flickers of respite. Murray is thoughtful re his Irish heritage (his great-grandmother moved from Ireland to Chicago in the 1850s) and charmingly droll with well-wishers. But then the producer asks for his thoughts on, say, Irish poetry, and the bowtie stops spinning and the shutters come down at the chuckle factory.

Why did Murray agree to it, I wonder? The Guinness? The worms? I fear the answer – along with the point of this extraordinarily irritating series – may have been “lost in translation”.