Tom Coyne’s A Course Called Ireland reaches Two on Sunday 25 October at 9.30pm, with Bill Murray driving the action across Ireland. The project turns Coyne’s book into TV, but the show keeps colliding with Murray’s habit of throwing out the script and making the trip itself the story.
Tom Coyne’s book first
Coyne’s book is the backbone of the series: he documented a journey through Ireland in which he played every course in Ireland. That premise gives the TV version a built-in route, a clear structure, and enough room for Murray to derail it whenever the trip starts feeling too neat.
The show follows Tom Coyne and Bill Murray around Ireland, which is the useful part for viewers trying to place it. It is not a studio-bound celebrity chat piece; it is a travelogue built from movement, local stops, and the golf courses that Coyne used to shape the original book.
Bill Murray in Ireland
Bill Murray is the reason the screen version looks less like a tidy adaptation and more like a moving target. The show includes scenes of him being mobbed when he stops in Irish villages, and he later rips up the itinerary and refuses scripted parts of the filming.
One line from Murray captures that instinct for self-sabotage and self-preservation at once: “If I wasn’t famous, I’d probably have a few more cuts and bruises to the face.” The remark fits the footage around him, where he keeps slipping away from the formal plan and pulling the production back toward whatever he wants to do instead.
The folk music detour
Murray disappears to a nearby evening of folk music instead of attending a pub as scripted, then returns to the pub and leads a drunken singalong after filming has been aborted. That sequence tells you more about the show’s shape than any polished trailer could: the adaptation keeps pretending it can stay on rails, then admits Murray is the engine and the obstruction at once.
The strongest reason to watch is that contradiction. A Course Called Ireland is sold as a journey through Ireland built from Coyne’s book, yet Murray’s refusal to behave like a standard host keeps turning it into something looser, funnier, and less obedient than a routine travel series.
50 years of Murray
A 76-year-old Murray brings the kind of loose, unpredictable presence that can either flatten a travel format or save it. Here, it does both, and the result is a series that looks most alive when it stops pretending the itinerary matters more than the people in it.
How many courses Coyne actually played in Ireland is the number that gives the whole project its scale, and the book answers it by making the route itself the point. On Two at 9.30pm on Sunday 25 October, that journey becomes the pitch: not golf as sport, but golf as the reason two men keep wandering through Ireland and finding trouble along the way.
