Rutland Weekend Television
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.
"RWT" redirects here. For other uses, see RWT (disambiguation).Rutland Weekend Television
Eric Idle
Ian Keill
Neil Innes
United Kingdom
2
14
approx. 30 minutes
12 May 1975 –
24 December 1976
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]
A typical episode[edit]
The episode begins with the in-vision announcer, usually with something going wrong or with something unusual, from announcements catching fire to open auditions for the announcer itself. Occasionally the announcement was sung or performed by more than one person. In one episode, the announcements are performed by "The Ricochet Brothers" (spelled Ricochet but pronounced Rick-ot-chet) who begin the episode as a pair, and expand to a full cast, each group speaking the announcement in unison.
The role of the announcer was to announce the "programmes" (typically sketches) – many programmes would lead into, or announce, one of many songs and accompanying strange vignettes by Neil Innes. Innes recalled that the cheaper-looking sets added to the show; "It was sometimes a problem but that was in fact the whole raison d'etre of the programme. It was such a cheap budget programme that it worked in our favour. You could actually show how cheap and cheerful it was because it was Rutland Weekend Television. It was made in a studio at the BBC called Presentation B, which is where they do the weather from."[3]
Python influence[edit]
Aside from the first appearance of the Rutles, the show features some surreal humour in the style associated with Monty Python. One sketch features the Lone Ranger (Idle) transformed into the Lone Accountant, with Innes as Tonto accidentally murdering holdup victims while trying to rescue them ("too many gin-and-tonic at lunch... You think it easy to be Indian and accountant?"). Another scene features Gwen Taylor visiting the doctor to complain of her constantly changing costume and surroundings and being diagnosed with "bad continuity." The prescribed treatment is editing out two weeks of her life, after which she says she feels well, and a bit hungry... though her soundtrack is still off. She then becomes a victim of recurring film flashbacks, eventually disappearing back into her childhood.
Innes subsequently created and starred in The Innes Book of Records, a pre-MTV show that wove together strange guests and music videos in a bewildering array of musical styles and visual styles.
The premise of Rutland Weekend Television is superficially similar to that of the Canadian comedy series Second City Television (SCTV), as both are comedic shows about a small independent low-budget TV network. However, the shows were created independently around the same time in 1975 and 1976, and neither show had been seen by the creators of the other at the time of their initial airings—and indeed, for years after.