Neil Innes

Rutland Weekend Television was a television sketch show on BBC2, written by Eric Idle with music by Neil Innes. Two series were broadcast, the first consisting of six episodes in 1975, the second of seven in 1976. A Christmas special also aired on Boxing Day 1975.

It was Idle’s first television project after Monty Python’s Flying Circus, which ended the previous year. The show was the catalyst for The Rutles. Rutland Weekend Television or RWT centred on “Britain’s smallest television network”, situated in England’s smallest county, Rutland.

The show’s title alludes to London Weekend Television. A Rutland TV station would be pretty small, so a Rutland Weekend Television would have to be ridiculously tiny. The joke was doubly meaningful as Idle had accidentally been granted a presentation budget instead of the more lavish budgets associated with light entertainment – so the weekly patter about their inability to buy props and sets was in fact quite real. Indeed, the last show of the first series featured Idle and Innes, stripped and shivering in blankets under a bare bulb, singing about how the power’s about to be shut off. Idle speaks bitterly about these conditions now but his attempts to overcome them formed the basis of a lot of the show’s jokes.