I have been a fan of Monty Python for years and am also a fan of (most of), the resulting spin offs. Fawlty Towers and Ripping Yarns in particular. However, after all these years I've come to the following conclusion about Eric Idle's series Rutland Weekend Television. - I don't really like it.
Whilst there is a nostalgic feeling I still get when watching it, most of it just isn't very funny. About 85% of it fails to even raise a smile and of the 15% that does, most of that is courtesy of Neil Innes' songs a nice throwback to the musical interludes he used to do with the Bonzo Dog Band on Do Not Adjust Your Set almost a decade before.
Surely there's some pearlers in there such as cooking Time with Lenin, Marx and Stalin, the first appearance of The Rutles, the prisoner who's waiting to be hanged, only to have his execution 'candled' at the last minute and the parody of The Old Grey Whistle Test with Eric Idle's wonderful take on 'Whispering' Bob Harris.
However, you soon come to realise that Idle's humour tends to be a bit 'samey' and repetitive and his best work was already behind him having been done with the Pythons. Here we see Idle just trying to replicate what he had already done. The faux TV talk show, the non-sensical narrations at the start of sketches, the shop keeper with silly customers. We'd seen it all before only better.
The only thing any viewer can take away from this is to realise that the Monty Python troupe were clearly greater than the sum of its parts and the fact they were ALL writers on that show gave the humour some form of variety. With Eric Idle writing the material for RWT alone, that lack of variety is obvious and it suffers all the more for it.
However, Idle did surround himself with some consummate professionals to help him perform his skits, such as David Battley and Henry Woolf. The greatest thing that LWT gave to it's audience was that it bought the wonderful Gwen Taylor to national attention, who lit up the screen whenever she was on it and is one of the main reasons to watch.
By far the weakest of all the post Python projects and the one that has also aged the worst. Sorry Eric, but this was a bit of a swing and miss.
