Rutland Weekend Television

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Rutland Weekend Television
Genre	Sketch comedy
Created by	Eric Idle
Written by	Eric Idle
Directed by	Ian Keill
Starring	Eric Idle Neil Innes David Battley Henry Woolf Terence Bayler Gwen Taylor
Music by	Neil Innes
Country of origin	United Kingdom
No. of series	2
No. of episodes	14
Production
Running time	approx. 30 minutes
Original release
Network	BBC2
Release	12 May 1975 (1975-05-12) – 24 December 1976 (1976-12-24)
Related
The Rutles
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Rutland Weekend Television (RWT) was a television sketch show written by Eric Idle with music by Neil Innes. Two series were broadcast on BBC2, the first consisting of six episodes in 1975, and the second series of seven episodes in 1976. A Christmas special was broadcast on Boxing Day 1975.

It was Idle's first television project after Monty Python's Flying Circus, which had ended the previous year, and was the catalyst for The Rutles. Rutland Weekend Television ostensibly centred on "Britain's smallest television network", situated in England's smallest (and mainly rural) county, Rutland. Rutland had been abolished as a county in April 1974 so, supposedly, there were tax advantages to broadcasting from somewhere that did not legally exist. This framework allowed for a range of sketches and material to be presented, all as part of the fictional network's hosted programming. Nevertheless, even this very loose concept was frequently ignored, and material was presented with a more stream-of-consciousness approach, with no particular tie-in to the RWT framework. Typically, in addition to sketch material, each episode also featured two music videos (a term not yet coined in 1975) of Neil Innes songs, which were woven into the flow of the show.

The show's title alludes to London Weekend Television. A Rutland television station would be pretty small (representing roughly 30,000 people in an area less than 150 square miles), so a Rutland Weekend Television would have to be ridiculously tiny. The joke was doubly meaningful as Idle had to work with the very limited budget of the BBC Presentation department^[1] instead of the more lavish budgets associated with light entertainment – so the weekly patter about their inability to buy props and sets reflected reality. 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 was about to be cut off. Idle spoke bitterly about these conditions years later but his attempts to overcome them formed the basis of a lot of the show's jokes.

Idle, in a 1975 Radio Times interview, remarked, "It was made on a shoestring budget, and someone else was wearing the shoe. The studio is the same size as the weather forecast studio and nearly as good. We had to bring the sets up four floors for each scene, then take them down again. While the next set was coming up, we'd change our make-up. Every minute mattered. It's not always funny to be funny from ten in the morning until ten at night. As for ad-libbing, what ad-libbing? You don't ad-lib when you're working with three cameras and anyway the material goes out months after you've made it."^[2]