I ’m suspicious of travelogues, which often feature celebrities in contrived situations, serving up a sentimental postcard of a place that is tantamount to a lie. I also hate how famous people are inexorably drawn to golf: a boring game historically predicated on a rancid mix of social exclusivity and extensive land ownership. So it was perverse of me to watch a show in which author Tom Coyne drives around Ireland playing various courses with his friend, actor Bill Murray . It’s the perfect intersection of none of my interests.
I was, however, hooked by a strange promise in A Course Called Ireland’s introductory sequence. “This is not a show about golf,” it says. “It’s not even a show about Bill Murray.” This was immediately followed by a scene in which an Irish woman standing by the roadside misidentified the actor as Bill Cosby. OK, I thought. What are they teeing up here?
There’s a hole in at least one of those promises. A Course Called Ireland (Sunday 25 October, 9.30pm, BBC Two) is intended to be a jocular road trip, in which the two friends meet colourful characters and reflect on their own Irish heritage, between spectacular rounds on the rugged links. It’s based on a journey Coyne documented in his book of the same name, in which he played every course in the country. Which again, sounds like a marriage in crisis to me – but the book is very popular.
What we get is a fascinating, existential snapshot of fame. A camera crew trailing a Hollywood legend around a series of Irish villages is, unavoidably, the story. Murray can’t stop for a wee without being mobbed. The director wants as much Murray on screen as possible. The 76-year-old Ghostbuster wants to give the spotlight to anyone else who’ll take it. The wheels quickly start to come off. He rips up the itinerary, digs in his heels, grouches. He cringes at the artifice of making TV, such as pretending to meet people for the first time. He’s been famous for 50 years – and it shows.
He also embodies the paradox of the reluctant celebrity, which is that most of them can’t stop doing things that perpetuate their myth. They hate the fame, they need the fame. The oddball actor is known for giving regular people “a Bill Murray story”, crashing graduation ceremonies or stepping behind the bar to pull pints. We see that here, as he hoists a groomsman on his shoulders, or gently pushes an ice-cream in a woman’s face. As he jokes, “If I wasn’t famous, I’d probably have a few more cuts and bruises to the face.”
In one sequence, Murray refuses to attend a pub as scripted, and disappears to a nearby evening of folk music instead. Later, once filming has been aborted, he returns to the pub to lead the room in a drunken singalong. It’s exactly what the producers would have wanted; for Murray, such larks only have meaning if they aren’t being manufactured for the cameras. There is something heroic in his stubbornness. (Of course, someone films the whole thing on their mobile phone.)
The show bends many of the format rules, by necessity or design. The BTS feeling of a crew working around a recalcitrant star is juicy. Each episode also boasts a voiceover from a supporting character – the proprietor of a tweed shop, a junior runner, Ireland’s former minister of the arts. The best is Margaret, an elderly woman outside a sweet shop who tells Murray he was the best thing in “Gorseboosters”. “Bill is 98% Irish if you look at his DNA, which I haven’t, but it says so here in the script,” she lilts. These unexpected and charming turns ground a show that otherwise feels like Lost in La Mancha set in Ballybunion.
If the show fails by its own marker, it succeeds at being funny, peculiar and melancholy: a much higher bar. It’s as unconventional and highly watchable as its impish star, the one it pretends not to be hopelessly in thrall to. What’s more, I finally understand why celebrities love golf so much. They want to be as far away from other people as possible.
