I T says a lot about the kind of weather that has been commonplace at the Dunhill Links Championship down the years that I once managed to mistake Jodie Kidd for Hugh Grant, so heavily had the pair swaddled themselves in waterproofs as they set off on their rounds.

Then again, the incident also said a lot about my general level of interest in watching celebrities tramp round the classic courses of Scotland. Strip out the actors, the footballers and the bankers (by far the most numerous grouping among the amateurs) and there is a serious golf tournament going on here, but it can be devilishly difficult to see it for the first three days.

Of course, the professionals all say they love the tournament to bits and it is the privilege of their lives to play with Humber Schlumfeifer III, the founder and chief executive of the Contaminated Pork Co. At least they say that in public, when the organisers put microphones in front of them. Privately, they would far rather just be getting on with their jobs without the encumbrance of trying to keep an amateur hacker amused.

In fairness, some players can treat it like an end-of-term jolly. The sentiments of Rory McIlroy are perfectly sincere when he says it is a pleasure to partner his father Gerry for a few rounds. But then, McIlroy is coming towards the end of a year in which he has won two majors, a Ryder Cup, has consolidated his status as the best player in the world and has just been named PGA Player of the Year. In every sense, he can afford to take it lightly.

Chris Doak has a rather different perspective on life at the moment. The 36-year-old Scot has been a regular attendee at the European Tour's end-of-year qualifying school, and he will be heading there again soon if he cannot move up the Race to Dubai money list on which he currently occupies 115th place. Yet as he fights to save his card, Doak is obliged to do so in the company of Christian Nellemann, a telecoms entrepreneur.

Nellemann has apparently won a few business awards in his time; hopefully he will understand that Doak should be allowed to focus on keeping his business afloat right now.

As far as I can recall, Nellemann was not actually mentioned in any of the press releases that have been part of the build-up to the event. Nor, for that matter, were very many of the amateurs, for the simple reason that their names would mean absolutely nothing to most people. The tournament parades figures like Sir Bobby Charlton, Huey Lewis and Bill Murray, all regular participants, but the reality is that the vast majority of the amateur partners are drawn from the business world - and have paid heavily for the privilege of taking part.

When it came into being in 2001, taking the place of the unlamented and increasingly irrelevant Dunhill Cup, the Dunhill Links Championship was derided from the start. The weather that year was particularly gruesome, and the whole thing descended into farce as play was interrupted by heavy rain, thick fog and frequent stoppages.

As critics poured scorn on the event, the organisers tried to counter with a media charm offensive. "There wasn't much charm," said one golf writer at the time. "But it was certainly pretty offensive."

In fairness, they took the lessons of that debut disaster on board. They got rid of many of the huge stands that had been erected around the Old Course, having noticed that spectators within them were hardly being counted in huge numbers.

In time, they dropped admission charges for all but the final day - an acknowledgement, perhaps, that it is only at the sharp end, when most of the amateurs have left the stage, that the tournament is actually worth paying to watch. Heroically, they also refused to invite Chris Evans back after the DJ, who was partnering Nick Dougherty, won the event with a staggering 40-under-par score. There were mutterings of banditry on Evans's part, although he responded in kind by threatening to set up a rival tournament and call it the Dung Hill Championship.

This year's headline newcomer is Jamie Dornan, star of the soon to be released film version of Fifty Shades of Grey. If Dornan is happy to exhibits his privates on the silver screen then we can hardly criticise him for putting his modest golfing abilities on parade as well.

Then again, if the grim forecast for the next couple of days turns out to be accurate, he is about to find out that the east coast of Scotland offers many more shades of grey than any steamy novel.