THE RUTLES - I MUST BE IN LOVE.
The Rutles' 'I Must be in Love' from the 'The Rutles' spin-off from Rutland Weekend Television. Neil Innes and Eric Idle starred as the Lennon and McCartney figures. Neil and Eric produced many comedy characters including the Fabulous Bingo Brothers, while Neil Innes is noted for his hilarious take on protest singers in the 'Old Grey Whistle Test' spoof of a Protest Song.
Rutland Weekend Television was a television sketch show on BBC2, written by Eric Idle with music by Neil Innes. Two series, the first consisting of six episodes, the second of seven, were broadcast, in 1975 and 1976. A Christmas special also aired on Boxing Day 1975.
It was Idle's first television project after Monty Python's Flying Circus ended the previous year. The show is perhaps best known as the catalyst for The Rutles. The show/s have never been made available for DVD but can still be obtained in video format.
Rutland Weekend Television or RWT centred on "Britain's smallest television network", situated in England's smallest (and mainly rural) county, Rutland.
The show's title alludes to the small and real television broadcaster 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 instead of a light entertainment budget, Idle had accidentally been granted a presentation budget — not sketch comedy — so the weekly patter about their inability to buy props and sets was 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 best 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.'
Information edited from Wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rutland_Weekend_Television
