A Course Called Ireland and an old grump called Bill Murray

Bill Murray has made an entire career out of playing irascible, prickly, hangdog cynics: Ghostbusters’ Peter Venkman; Groundhog Day’s Phil Connors; that one Bill Murray-shaped character he plays in every Wes Anderson movie.

Across all his best work he takes a misanthropic gruffness that would be wholly intolerable in a real-life person and alchemises it into lovable charm within a fictional one.

What, though, do we get when we try to force the former to be the latter? The answer is a curiously mixed bag named A Course Called Ireland (BBC Two, Sunday), a six-part golfing travelogue that sometimes seems at cross purposes with its star.

The show follows Murray and his friend and golf buddy Tom Coyne, who writes books about the sport, as they embark on a trip around Ireland via as many golf courses as they can squeeze into three weeks.

There are some perfectly charming moments in the show’s first two episodes, filmed in Cork and Kerry, not least the obligatory drone shots of stunning Irish countryside and some lively patter with cheery locals. Some of the soft-focus Hibernophilia can be mildly grating, but there are pleasant pints and chats and an unexpectedly lengthy exegesis of the game of road bowls.

Murray drops the gruff exterior quite a lot early on, posing for photographs more or less gamely and repeatedly offering heartfelt thoughts about the Irish-American immigrant experience, which he delivers with unforced thoughtfulness and sincerity. I’ll freely admit to not being entranced by the golf footage thrown in, but it would be churlish to begrudge that within a show about the sport.

Except it’s not a show about golf. We know this because we’re told so at the start of the show, both in voiceover and in time-synced handwritten text on the screen, in one of the earliest examples of its bonkers narrative framing. It’s not even about Murray. It’s about “us”.

The voice telling us this is not Murray’s but that of Margaret Tenant, a charming Corkwoman he meets in the first episode, and who goes on to narrate the proceedings that follow. She’s a delightful interlocutor, but it never really stops being strange hearing her commenting on all the things Murray is seeing and doing, in the manner of someone relating events on screen to a partially sighted friend.

In the second episode she’s replaced by a young runner named Jeff Sheehan, another perfectly charming person, but his script, like Tenant’s, is peppered with dozens of dire zingers and “sure, have you ever seen the like?”-style utterances, which his producers seem to have written exclusively for the benefit of viewers recovering from serious head injuries.

Both, at several points, remind the viewer to enjoy themselves, in a manner that has a tendency to achieve the opposite effect.

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Inarguably the most distracting point about their voiceovers, however, is that they exist at all. I’d not fault the makers for insisting that this was an entirely artistic decision, that they fell in love with these genuinely lovely people and that their minor interactions with the programme’s star inspired the team to deny the narrator’s job to one of the world’s most beloved and recognisable comic actors.

But Occam’s razor does allow for the possibility that they hired a man who possesses one of the most recognisable voices on earth on the understanding that he himself would narrate the programme, only to discover he had absolutely no intention of doing so by series’ end.

Seeds of this thought can be found peppered midway through the second episode, which airs this Sunday, in which Sheehan’s narration repeatedly hints that Murray would have good reason not to be enjoying any of this.

“I did begin to wonder,” his voiceover intones at one point, “how long would this be fun for. A day? A week? Imagine being as famous as Bill for even an hour. It looks exhausting.” Which is certainly a stark choice for a show attempting such a carefree, genial tone.

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Keen followers of cinema will recognise this as foreshadowing, and sure enough moments of unguarded brusqueness steadily accrete, as when Murray “jokingly” barks orders at his cameraman and huffs at the director’s requests for staged bits and canned introductions.

Things come to a head when he refuses to take part in a storytelling chat he’s due to film with this week’s guest star, the ever-amiable Chris O’Dowd – who up to this point has been keeping Murray in high spirits – in favour of catching a folk concert nearby.

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“Everyone agreed it was best to keep our distance,” Sheehan says over strikingly sullen footage of Murray watching music by himself, before focus shifts to O’Dowd and Coyne having a perceptive and entertaining chat about Irish storytelling culture in his absence.

The overall effect is of a show whose best moments transcend its egregious voiceover and ubiquitous Oirishisms but that feels too tonally confused to sit comfortably with itself. Too strained be cosy. Too bland to be biting. A show which feels increasingly as if it’s not so much made with Murray as around him. A show which suggests that, if you do decide to hire the star of Caddyshack and Groundhog Day, sometimes you’ll be working with the jocular rogue who wins hearts on the golf course and sometimes it’ll be the man who has lived this day 10,000 times or more and would do anything to make it all stop.

Fresh from that, you may wish to refill your cask of comfort with something of a purer malt. Thankfully, last weekend saw the return of Mortimer & Whitehouse: Gone Fishing (BBC Two, Sunday), which continues to be the true high-water mark of this type of TV.

The opener sees Bob Mortimer and Paul Whitehouse begin their ninth series angling for barbel on the Ribble river in Lancashire. (This weekend will see them fishing for bream in the Breckland lakes of Norfolk.)

As ever, the pace is leisurely, as the friends cast their lines and chatter pleasantly about nothing in particular: the insouciance of cormorants, whether or not they wear pyjamas to bed, the preferred manner and timing of their respective deaths. Whitehouse does a bit more fishing; Mortimer puts together a hearty Lancashire hotpot.

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The only sop to anything approaching tragedy is in the case of their trusty terrier Ted, who viewers may detect has lost a step or two since his younger days. Sadly, the end credits inform us, this was his final appearance on the show – although, in proper Gone Fishing style, his death is announced via a memorial card in which he is photographed wearing a full tuxedo.

When the series started, in 2018, the comedians made much of their status as old geezers with dicky hearts, and if their faces have crinkled a little more in the eight years since, their repartee spill sparkles. The glory of this programme is in a married-couple dynamic that is, for once, a reference not to stubborn intransigence and muted bickering but to genuine warmth and total ease in each other’s company.

This is glacially gentle programming, and all the better for it. A mellow marvel, buoyed by the irresistible sense that its two stars really do want to be there. We should be truly glad we get to join them.