Stick (Apple TV+) 

Rating:

The gods of television are cruel. No sooner do I confess my loathing for golf than they send a ten-part comedy series about the game.

Of course I’m big-headed enough to believe they read this telly column on Mount Olympus. 

But it’s more likely, I suppose, that Apple executives are eager for a sports serial to emulate the surprise success of their feelgood show Ted Lasso, about an American football manager who revives a struggling Premier League club.

Problem is, you can enjoy Ted Lasso even if you care nothing about football. Stick, which stars Owen Wilson as a washed-up former professional golfer who discovers a troubled teenage protege, is relentlessly, monotonously fixated with the business of hitting a small round object with a long pole.

If you’re hypnotised by CGI shots tracking a white ball in flight over trees and lakes, you’ll enjoy this a lot. If you possess an endless capacity for studying a man shuffling his feet and swinging a club in an arc, this is definitely the show for you. And if you thrill with paroxysms of excitement because a first drive soars onto the green, you may need to keep smelling salts to hand.

The opening scene introduces Wilson as Pryce Cahill, a one-time Ryder Cup player now reduced to working as a salesman in a golfing supplies shop. He’s selling a top-of-the-range club to a clueless customer.

Then he’s at his other job, coaching elderly ladies on their putting technique at the local club in Indiana, USA. (Don’t ask me why the state is still called Indiana and not Native Americana — political correctness obviously hasn’t arrived there yet.)

That evening, Pryce is sinking beers in a bar, when a fellow customer starts mocking his fall from the golfing heights. The confrontation ends in a $1,000 bet on a putting contest.

How much tension can be packed into the build-up to a golf putt across the carpet of a bar-room, with a whisky glass on its side as the target? Not very much, it turns out — and I cared even less when Pryce missed the shot on purpose, as part of a scam.

His fellow con artist is played by Marc Maron, who was brilliant in the Netflix series Glow, yet another sports comedy — this one about female wrestlers.

Maron is always watchable, but his character in Stick doesn’t make much sense: he’s Pryce’s former caddy, a morose and monosyllabic man who somehow possesses the ability to switch on a torrent of wiseacre patter.

The protege, Santi (Peter Dager), is equally unconvincing — one minute hard-working, wise and empathetic, the next a sulky teen who can’t take his eyes off his phone.

Stick does offer more than this. There’s a romantic backstory, and Wilson is charismatic enough to make us want to see his booze-swilling, dope-smoking, self-sabotaging character find redemption.

But before that happens, you’re going to have to watch an awful lot of golf.