{"id":894890,"date":"2026-10-26T04:54:14","date_gmt":"2026-10-26T04:54:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/894890\/"},"modified":"2026-10-26T04:54:14","modified_gmt":"2026-10-26T04:54:14","slug":"a-course-called-ireland-review-why-did-bill-murray-ever-agree-to-this-irish-golf-show-television-radio","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/894890\/","title":{"rendered":"A Course Called Ireland review \u2013 why did Bill Murray ever agree to this Irish golf show? | Television & radio"},"content":{"rendered":"

A Course Called Ireland is a new documentary in which Bill Murray<\/a> golfs his way around the \u201cEmerald Isle\u201d 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.<\/p>\n

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 \u201chardworking Irish worms\u201d that stripe the fairways of coastal Cork. And here he is saying \u201chah-hah\u201d 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, \u201chah-hah\u201d. We ready our jaws for the cavalcade of bittersweet guffaws that will inevitably follow.<\/p>\n

But what\u2019s 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 (\u201cYou were in the Ghostbusters!\u201d) during his visit to the harbour town of Cobh and, for reasons that presumably involved the phrases \u201clocal colour\u201d and \u201ccheaper than hiring a professional\u201d, is subsequently employed to narrate the first episode. Can Margaret\u2019s chuckling befuddlement compensate for her inexperience? No, she\u2019s terrible. Still, she is here now so we may as well let her get on with it. \u201cThis series is not about golf,\u201d she shouts over footage of a golf course. \u201cAnd it\u2019s not really about Bill Murray,\u201d she adds over footage of Murray.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

What is it about, Margaret? It\u2019s \u201cabout the Irish\u201d, she says, uncertainly. \u201cSort of.\u201d And it is about the Irish. Sort of. But it\u2019s 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\u2019t want to do what he has been hired to do. It is also about what happens when producers, sensing calamity, allow said celebrity\u2019s seeming waywardness to dictate the tone of the production, then get frustrated with the results and overcompensate with an effortful \u201cquirkiness\u201d and a soundtrack of theme-pub fiddles so hysterical it appears for ever on the brink of Riverdancing itself off the nearest cliff.<\/p>\n

The awfulness begins in County Cork, with a largely uncommunicative Murray driving around various golf courses and pubs with his friend \u2013 and author of the book on which this six-part travelogue is based \u2013 Tom Coyne. Murray doesn\u2019t want to do what the producers want him to do. This includes discussing the history of Irish storytelling (\u201cIt\u2019s not the fucking Bill Murray show\u201d) and walking up a staircase (\u201cNo\u201d). I assume these huffs have been left in the edit as an explanation\/excuse for the subsequent arse-over-tittery. \u201cLook what we\u2019ve had to put up with!\u201d is the subtext, a cry for help that would be more stirring had anyone from the production company bothered to type the words \u201cBill Murray reputation for prickliness\u201d 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\u2019s increasingly desperate efforts to pretend everything\u2019s tickety-boo (\u201cjust try to enjoy yourselves!\u201d), all of which is punctuated by the eyerolls of a man who gives the impression of wishing to be anywhere else.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

Why did Murray agree to it, I wonder? The Guinness? The worms? I fear the answer \u2013 along with the point of this extraordinarily irritating series \u2013 may have been \u201clost in translation\u201d.<\/p>\n

A Course Called Ireland is on iPlayer now<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A Course Called Ireland is a new documentary in which Bill Murray golfs his way around the \u201cEmerald…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":894891,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[71],"tags":[427,99],"class_list":["post-894890","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-golf","tag-golf","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/894890","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=894890"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/894890\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/894891"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=894890"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=894890"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=894890"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}