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The Hollywood star is so grumpy in this new travelogue it’s like he wishes he wasn’t there. Think sulky car journeys, strained encounters and the sense of a TV series imploding 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. Continue reading...

In his rogue new travelogue, the Hollywood star tees off, has drunken pub singalongs – but mostly just proves how tired he is of fame 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? Continue reading...