Rutland Weekend Television

Having watched both series of RWT in 1975/6, I felt that while Eric Idle had gone back to the sketch format - albeit with a framework based on a fictitious TV station - his approach was closer to Spike Milligan than Monty Python. All the sketches wove in and out of the shows, there were rather surreal moments, and there were Neil Innes' songs - many of them in fact - that made RWT rather like a revue than a sketch show. David Battley, Terence Bayler, Henry Woolf and Gwen Taylor provided a firm cast from which many characters were drawn (notably, in Battley's case, David Frost, which he had also played in Mrs. Wilson's Diary in 1968). Of course, The Rutles provided the most memorable musical moment as well as the template for the future TV special. The only pity is that none of "Rutland Weekend Television" is available on DVD/video for re-evaluation, for whatever reason, and yet despite its budgetary limitations, it has indefinable qualities. Certainly it would stand up well to a repeat viewing.