Bleary eyed breakfast audience find it hard to see funny side

COMEDIAN Bill Murray has the face of a man who never gets enough sleep. But on Saturday morning he seemed to be catching up on it, as a group of bleary eyed journalists summoned for a breakfast time audience waited an hour for him to arrive.

The appointed 10 a.m. came and went, but the star of Groundhog Day - in which he played a cynical television weatherman whose annual visit to a town with a weather forecasting groundhog keeps repeating itself over and over until he learns to be a nice person - refused to emerge from the underground.

Instead, it was the journalists' who kept waking up and finding the PR people repeating themselves over and over: We think he's left the hotel. He should be here in five minutes. Hopefully. Would you like another coffee?

When Bill and his brothers did turn up, they pleaded that they were on "Caribbean time". Sensing an ugly mood, however, they played the green card.

Younger brother Joel had taken the precaution of wearing an Irish rugby shirt. Bill for his part assured us that the family was 100 per cent Irish, and spoke fondly of their only living relative here, a 300 year old nun.

"She's still teaching, still very active, and kept alive by Guinness," he said, making a common mistake for visiting celebrities in town to promote a Murphy's sponsored event.

The headliners at next weekend's Murphy's Cat Laughs comedy festival in Kilkenny, the Murrays are unused to playing before sober audiences. So while Joel noted optimistically that Kilkenny had 92 pubs, Bill expressed sarcastic delight that they were doing some of their shows at 6 p.m., around the time people have just finished cutting their lawns".

Sober audiences or not, their programme will feature mostly sketches ("We don't do stand up, it's beneath us," says Bill) and will draw from Bill's and Brian's days in Chicago's seminal Second City Theatre.

But the real business of their Irish visit may have more to do with Mount Juliet than the comedy festival. The golf mad Murrays claim to have set themselves a target of 21 rounds on Ireland's best courses, and by Saturday they were up to only 1 1/2.

The brothers have led the box office activity for the festival, in which they play five performances from Thursday to Monday.

. The accommodation hot line number is 056-64387, not as stated in The Irish Times last week.