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Do you remember that time Jamie Dornan played someone who thought he was a buzzy bee?
'Wild Mountain Thyme' anyone?
Yeah. That was a real toe curler.
Well, buckle up because maybe he should steer clear of projects that smack of paddywackery.
That's because Series Two of 'The Tourist' is awful.
2022 saw Dornan score a major hit in the UK and Australia with the first series of the BBC1 and Stan thriller about an Irish amnesiac being pursued in the Outback while trying to piece together clues about his criminal past.
(SPOILER ALERT!!)
Series Two finds his character Elliott Stanley and his girlfriend, Danielle MacDonald's Probationary Constable Helen Chambers loved up on a train to Cambodia when she reveals she has been keeping a secret from him.
Helen has intercepted a letter from Ireland from someone called Tommy, telling Elliott it's time to find out who he really is.
A rendezvous is arranged at a lakeside cafe in Co Wicklow and Elliott and Helen travel there in the expectation that Tommy will shed some light on who he is.
However Tommy doesn't show up.
Instead Elliott is kidnapped by a balaclava wearing gang while trimming his beard in the cafe toilets and is bundled into a van.
Helen eventually realises he's vanished when entering the gents loo and finding signs of a struggle.
Contacting the Gardai, Conor MacNeill's Detective Ruairi Slater arrives on the scene but he's useless.
Helen is always 10 steps ahead of him and keeps showing him how to do his job.
Elliott, meanwhile, manages to escape from the van driven by the trio in balaclavas but the gang recapture him after an epic pursuit.
They turn out to be Diarmuid Murtagh's hot headed Donal McDonnell, Nessa Matthews' Orla McDonnell and Mark McKenna's Fergal McDonnell and they all seem certain about who he is.
Holding him prisoner on an island, it appears Elliott is a member of a rival crime family known as the Cassidys who have bad blood with the McDonnells.
While Helen and Detective Slater try to piece together clues as to who might have taken him, Elliott manages to escape again but persuades the most sensitive member of the gang, Fergal to smuggle him off the island.
Helen encounters Elliott's real mum, Olwen Fouere's Niamh Cassidy and discovers his name is Eugene and he was good at ballet as a child.
However she's shocked to witness Niamh brutally murder a member of the McDonnell gang and phones Detective Slater about the killing.
Taking him to the murder scene, the ground floor flat appears to have been cleaned up and the corpse has disappeared.
Slater and Helen are instead confronted by Francis Magee's head of the rival gang, Frank McDonnell.
With Elliott/Eugene making it back onto the mainland, Frank and Donal bay for his blood.
However he also has to contend with Helen's buffoonish ex Greg Larsen's Ethan Crum who has flown out from Australia to win her back and a vengeful Victoria Haralabidou's Lena Pascal who has also headed out to punish him for a crime he committed before he lost his memory.
With all elements of an unsavoury past colliding, can Elliott/Eugene avoid getting sucked into old feuds?
What is the real reason behind the feud between Frank and Niamh?
And why is Detective Slater so weird?
Series One of 'The Tourist' was a twisty, diverting action thriller that confirmed Dornan's ability to carry a show as a charismatic lead.
It also aimed for Coen Brothers or David Lynch quirkiness.
But it was also often overcooked, with its writers Jack and Harry Williams stuffing the show with one twist too many.
Series Two finds the Williams brothers aiming for a Hitchcock style adventure.
But they also turn to Irish TV directors Fergus O'Brien, Kate Dolan and Lisa Mulcahy to sprinkle a bit of local authenticity to their show.
The whole venture, however, is horribly misguided with the authors regularly slipping into 21st Century Oirish cinematic cliches and showing little feel for the vernacular.
And so viewers are served up stock Irish figures of feuding gangsters, feckless Gardai and sensitive young lads in a world where whisky guzzling Paddies whack each other while indulging in modern day Paddywhackery.
It's so lazily written, it's like the Williams brothers have devoured loads of Brendan Gleeson films and have tried to come up with a hodge podge of 'Perrier's Bounty,''The Guard' and 'The Banshees of Inisherin'.
It's as bad as Barnaby Thompson's cod Irish caper movie 'Pixie'and that was terrible.
And like that movie, there's an awful lot of Irish talent who really ought to know better.
O'Brien, Dolan and Mulcahy for a start are experienced directors in British and Irish film and TV with some decent shows like 'Happy Valley,' 'Red Rock' and 'Irish Pictorial Weekly' to their names.
Yet they seem to have no grip on a drama which doesn't really follow through on some of its bizarre twists.
Dornan has proven himself as a lead man but he spends his time scowling like a Northern Irish Jason Statham pretending to be Cary Grant.
Magee trots out his Dublin hardman routine which we've seen an awful lot of lately in much better projects like Series Two of RTE and AMC+'s Irish gangster series 'Kin' and last year's slightly less convincing but not without its merits Sky Max drug gang caper 'Then You Run'.
Fouere, who was so good in the Northern Irish apocalyptic drama 'The Survivalist,' sports a very wobbly Northern Irish accent and is terribly stiff.
MacNeill, a Northern Irish actor, handles his rural southern Irish brogue well but is poorly served with a frankly preposterous role as a Garda Dective with one hell of a shady secret.
While we're at it, where is the show set?
Is it Dublin, Wicklow or along the border between Northern Ireland and the Irish Republic because the accents are all over the place?
It seems to be set in a town where one gang is pure Dub and the other is pure Nordie, with the occasional eastern European, African or west of Ireland accent thrown into the mix.
McKenna is saddled with a poor man's version of a Barry Keoghan role of a sweet natured, troubled 'Inisherin' style fool, while Murtagh and Matthews huff and puff as shouty, incompetent thugs
Amid all this nonsense, MacDonald spends most of her time looking distressed.
Larsen resurrects a role that was really irritating in the first installment while Haralabidou just scowls.
Leaving aside the show's cloying modern Irish cliches, the Williams brothers' biggest crime is conjuring up frankly unbelievable twists - some of which go absolutely nowhere.
From the big reveal about Detective Slater to an underwhelming twist about Fergal to the unveiling of the truth behind Frank and Niamh's feud, the show consistently disappoints.
There are good grounds to suspect there's also an allegory at play.
Could the Williams brothers be using their story to lecture Irish people about the need to abandon old divisions and bury the past?
If that's what they are trying to do, the execution of that is terribly hamfisted.
In recent chat show appearances, Dornan has hinted there was no plan for a second series.
When a follow-up was mooted, he claims he insisted on setting it away from Australia because he had no desire to relocate his family back out there again while making it.
This is a refreshingly honest admission from a lead actor.
But it also smacks of the writers being asked to cobble something together, with little real thought.
Keeping all options open, the final shots of Season Two hint at more revelations to come.
But having mangled the second series, perhaps this story is best left alone.
(Series two of 'The Tourist' was broadcast on BBC1 in the UK from January 1-28, 2024, with episodes also made immediately available for streaming on the BBC iPlayer)
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