|
Post by Nancy on Jan 21, 2007 16:49:52 GMT
www.youtube.com/watch?v=4fC5B778OegAlways thought Neil Innes looked a bit freaky in this one, hardly recognizable in fact. I haven't seen much of RWT whats everyone else's memories of it?
|
|
|
Post by Nancy on Jan 23, 2007 20:20:11 GMT
|
|
|
Post by Beautiful Zelda on Jan 24, 2007 12:24:01 GMT
I remember watching RWT ;D but I oddly don't have any memories
|
|
|
Post by Nancy on Jan 24, 2007 12:31:39 GMT
In truth I can't remember it, but I've seen lots of clips from it, we should start a petition to have it repeated or something.
|
|
|
Post by Beautiful Zelda on Jan 26, 2007 17:46:08 GMT
They should repeat it especially with all the digital channels there's no excuse, they should also repeat 'The Innes Book of Records' it would be wonderful to see that again.
|
|
|
Post by moosehead on Dec 23, 2007 0:44:54 GMT
Some amusing contemporary quotes about RWT and the Rutles: From the Sun, Saturday 8th February 1975:
Quote Secret Plot by the Potty Pirates Fun TV will replace BBC! By CHRIS KENWORTHY
A NEW comedy series which threatens to be as funny and outrageous as Monty Python's Flying Circus has been made by the BBC.
It's called Rutland Weekend Television and its mastering is 31-year-old Eric Idle, of the original Python team.
He wrote it. He stars in it. And a lot of the inspired lunacy that was a feature of the Python programmes has gone into it.
The idea of the show is that when the BBC shuts down, the Rutland Weekend TV "pirates" station opens up.
Nerves
This week, the last of the six half-hour shows was finished. The series is likely to be seen later this year on BBC 2.
But nobody at the BBC is keen to talk openly about the series. It seems there has been a bout of executive nerves about it. Just the way there was over the Monty Python show.
Well - what have they got to be nervous about?
A technician connected with the series told me:
"Rutland Weekend TV will, we hope, be just about the funniest network in the world.
"And the worst - everything it does is awful, because it's so cheap and incompetent.'
Hmm ...
Drastic
"We aimed at taking to a logical conclusion what could happen to the BBC, if it was compelled to make drastic economies.
Ah - politics!
"Whether it will actually give offence," the technician went on, "depends on the kind of person you are.
"For instance, we show vicars and bishops in funny situations."
Oh dear ...
"In another," the technician said, "we show politicians being given lessons in television deportment.
"Which might upset some politicians and their supporters."
It might, indeed.
And since the BBC have had plenty of clashes with thin-skinned political people, that could be the main reason why everybody is making such a secret of the new venture.
Why Rutland Weekend Television?
Rutland used to be Britain's smallest county. Then it disappeared off the map altogether.
Which could make it a safer target for anything that Idle plans to do with its "television service."
Each show will include a song spot by Neil Innes, 29-year-old former member of the Bonzo Dog Doo Dah Band.
Other members of the cast will include Wanda Ventham, who starred in The Lotus Eaters and David Battley - the undertaker's gormless assistant in the comedy series That's Your Funeral.
Wanda Ventham, 35, told me: "I don't see any reason for worries about the programme."
The BBC say: "Yes, we are laughing at it behind our hands.
"It really is very funny."
Just as long as we're all allowed to share the joke.
From the Daily Mail, Wednesday 14th May 1975:
Quote Rutland is definitely not amused
THEY don't like the BBC's new Monty Python-type programme up in Rutland.
Rutland Weekend Television, written by Python man Eric Idle, had its debut on BBC 2 on Monday night.
Scenes included people disappearing under priests' clothing and a male pop singer wth the figure of a naked pregnant woman.
'An insult to the fair name of Rutland,' was a typical response yesterday.
Foremost among the protesters were three former chairmen of the urban council of Oakham, the market town in the centre of Rutland.
Rubbish
Mr Herrick Watchorn said: 'It was absolute tripe.'
Mrs Winifred Clark described the show as 'a load of rubbish with disgusting language and pictures.' She hoped that people in other parts of the country would not associate Rutland with the kind of thinking behind the programme.
Mr Bill Steele said: 'It was pathetic, in bad taste and should never have been linked with the name of Rutland,' he said.
A BBC spokesman said: 'It is an extremely silly programme and we hope no one will take it too seriously.'
● Rutland used to be Britain's smallest county. Now it's just a part of Leicestershire.
Extract from Joan Bakewell's reviews in The Listener, Thursday 29th May 1975:
Quote Fact and fantasy about television itself seems to figure increasingly in our view and viewing of ourselves. Rutland Weekend Television is not the first to mine to rich seam of programme parody. But Eric Idle has his own special brand of gibberish that made Come Dancing even more endearing that it is on its own. The series hasn't settled in yet. And running gags like the Kung Fu - Kung Fucius, Kung Fuey - don't fit easily within a series that is basically about a television service run mad. Holding hard to their theme is proving difficult, with the ebullient Eric bursting with inappropriate ideas and Neil Innes offering plaintive songs: It's all good fun, but they won't leave us asking for more if we don't know what it is we want more of.
Extract from One Man's Television by Bernard Davies, from page 15 of Broadcast, Wednesday 30th July 1975:
Quote Rutland Weekend Television (BBC 2 characteristically broadcast on Mondays) was an odd mixture of the brilliant and the sheerly silly, of the good idea made boring by being stretched to intolerable lengths, of the bad idea redeemed by simple cheek. Ah!, one says in one's cliche-ridden philosophical way, si jeunesse savait; si vieillesse pouvait! If you are going to let young men have the run of their teeth, you must put up with the errors of timings and emphasis for the sake of their new ideas and new approach; of their excruciating bad taste once can only speak in the highest terms of praise. More please.
From the Daily Express, Friday 17th March 1978. By David Wigg:
Quote ROLLING Stone Mick Jagger is to appear in a new TV show - sending up The Beatles.
The show is called "All you Need is Cash" and stars a group called The Rutles.
Like the Beatles, they have mop-style haircuts and wear the same round-collared jackets of the sixties.
The 90-minute musical comedy, which also stars Mick's wife Bianca, George Harrison, Paul Simon and fellow Stone Ronnie Wood, will be screened on B.B.C.2 on Easter Monday.
The show has been masterminded by Monty Python star Eric Idle. He plays one of the Rutles with another Python name, Neil Innes.
There are songs performed by The Rutles that have a Beatle ring about their titles - like "Hold My Hand," "With A Girl Like You" and "Ouch!"
With tongue-in-cheek humour the story states the meteoric rise to "excess" of the Rutles.
One of the funniest sequences is when former Beatle George Harrison is seen in the streets disguised as a greying interviewer.
Mick Jagger is asked why as thought The Rutles broke up? He replies: "Women. Just women getting in the way, Cherchez la femme you know."
The show is a bundle of laughs. All you need is to be old enough to remember...
Page 6 of the Hollywood Reporter, Wednesday 22nd March 1978:
Quote TELEVISION REVIEW
All You Need Is Cash NBC, March 22, 9:30-11 p.m.
Just when one might imagine every possible perspective regarding the phenomenal rise and retirement of the Beatles has been examined, along comes "All You Need Is Cash." Against all odds, the attempt is quite wacky but very successful. The focal point is a group called the Rutles, whose path to publicity, profits and problems directly mirrors their original counterparts. The Rutles make movies ("A Hard Day's Rut" and "Ouch"), incorporate (only instead if an apple, the symbol is a banana), embark upon a "Tragical History Tour" as well as that universally renowned animated feature dubbed "Yellow Submarine Sandwich."
The ensemble gathered to re-create these goofy goings-on range from established rock-personalities Mick Jagger and Paul Simon, for starters - to other equally adroit actors. The Rutles are composed of Eric Idle, Neil Innes, John Hulsey and Ricky Fataar. Dan Aykroyd, John Belushi, Bill Murray and Gilda Radner - right, the Not Ready for Prime Time Players - cavort and confuse effectively. The same can be said for Jeanette Charles, Terence Bayler, Michael Palin, Gwen Taylor, Ron Wood and Henry Woolf. Oh yes, plus somebody named George Harrison.
Idle is the chief madman in charge of this lunacy he conceived, wrote and codirected (Gary Weis shared insanities on this end) with knowledgeable nuttiness. Innes' music and lyrics are indeed reminiscent and a deft shade shy of overtly incorporating McCartney and Lennon's creations while Aviva Slesin edited with sure fidelity. Weis also photographed confidently as well as producing along with Craig Kellem. Lorne Michaels was executive producer. It's all certifiably crazy satire, naturally, but the point is: it works.
- Earl Davis
From Time Out, Friday 24th to Thursday 30th March 1978:
Quote Beatles Burlesque
An expensive, comic resurrection of The Beatles appears on BBC-TV on Easter Monday. John Collis previews
To paraphrase Woody Allen, Eric Idle had an idea and managed to find the financial backing to turn it into a concept. The idea was to parody The Beatles, in an episode of 'Rutland Weekend Television', Idle's BBC series. In collaboration with that expert of musical pastiche, Neil Innes, the sketch was developed on the American comedy show 'Saturday Night Live', and now arrives as a fully-fledged package: an elaborately-garnished record album and a TV documentary, featuring the rise and fall of The Rutles.
There is really only one gag in the film 'All You Need is Cash', but while the comic philosophers sort out whether there are three or 12 basic jokes, it's a good enough gag to be going on with. It simply involves recognising which public icon of The Beatles' career is being re-created; the laughs come from the extraordinary accuracy of the pastiche, combined with a sudden nostalgic charge prompted by memories of the real thing. In spite of the Pythonesque distortions, that is the Fab Four (now transformed into the Prefab Four) appearing on BBC-TV, arriving in America for the first time, recording 'All You Need Is Love', reacting to Epstein's suicide.
The whole thing is bound together by Idle's familiar but always welcome TV interviewer persona who stands on drab streets outside theatres and in the cellars which are all that remain of The Rutles' myth. He does not seem to have spoken to everyone, though they are now sadly aged, who had any part in the career of The Rutles. At times the in-jokes become delightfully convoluted.
George Harrison lays a TV interviewer who talks to Michael Palin, playing press-officer Derek Taylor under the pseudonym Eric Manchester, about the idealistic naivete of Apple. Meanwhile the Apple building is ransacked behind them. Harrison is the only Beatle to take part in the farce, though Mick Jagger reminisces splendidly about the long-gone rivalry between The Stones and The Rutles.
As a sound-track to the film, Neil Innes' words and music are an integral part of the joke. His music parodies sometimes refer to specific songs, sometimes to a stage in the development of one of The Beatles. They are invariably spot-on, but as a record album they need the support of the third element in the package, the album art-work. Without this, the purely-aural joke would soon wear thin.
Sometimes the metaphor is a little obvious; for example, The Beatles' much-publicised drug-taking is transformed into a penchant for tea. But 'Leggy' Mountbatten, bizarrely representing Epstein, is a masterpiece. At the point where 'Leggy' recognises that his hold over 'his boys' is weakening, and while they sit at the feet of Surrey mystic Arthur Sultan, he is overcome by a fit of depression. Lonely, and unable to reach anyone on the phone, he emigrates to Australia. The shot of the ridiculous 'Leggy', standing at the window with the curtains billowing around him, is at once hilarious, cruel, and touching. 'All You Need Is Cash' is the most extravagant, the funniest, and with any luck the last, indulgence in nostalgia for the '60s.
'All You Need Is Cash' is aired on BBC 2, 8.45, March 27.
Extract from One Man's Television by Bernard Davies, from page 16 of Broadcast, Monday 10th April 1978:
Quote The Rutles (BBC-2, Easter Monday) was interesting on several counts. When I have been drawn into discussion about working class culture, the Beatles are usually brought forward as instances of disadvantaged lads from the working class who have not only made a lot of money (their money, to be frank, is usually irrelevant in this kind of discussion) but who have also got themselves discussed seriously as creative artists and musicians. They were the shining examples of what can happen if the working class is allowed to do its own thing and to follow its own cultural stars.
It is, therefore, interesting to see the Beatles parodied and indeed satirised. Is nothing, one asks despairingly, scared to Eric Idle and his bright, brave, and young associates? It is also interesting to hear Neil Innes's parodies of Beatles numbers - well, they were parodies and meant to be parodies, and Neil Innes, of course, is no McCartney or Lennon, but does he have to make Beatles songs sound so thin? Much of Idle's satire was aimed at that elephantine target the media, but a good deal rubbed off on the lads themselves; it was surprising to find how long ago it all was - how remote, how (dare I say it?) meaningless. The irony is pointed: McCartney the songsmith, the voice of youth, the voice of popular culture, is now best known for that ghastly "Mull of Kintyre"!
Extract from Broadcast's Guide To The Franchise Trail, from page 26 of Broadcast, Monday 19th May 1980:
Quote RUTLAND
The 45th, and least expected, application to arrive at Brompton Road on May 9, was from Rutland Weekend Television, accompanied by a sample copy of the RWTV Times already familiar to readers of Eric Idle's Rutland Weekend book). An accompanying letter from Mrs Elsie Harbinger, Rutland Weekend's head of Light Entertainment designate (and former station cleaner), and addressed to "Dear Sir or Miss" explains they are applying for a franchise because they need the money. She asks specifically for the ATV franchise, not that they have anything against Lord Grade, but feel it's time he should retire or take charge of the BBC. Failing that, however, they'd be happy with "Teatime in Liverpool or breakfast in Cardiff and/or Newquay."
Unfortunately, Mrs Harbinger sent only one copy and the IBA's head of Information Barbara Hosking rang the enclosed (and genuine) Ansafone number to request another 20 copies of the application for the Authority's perusal.
|
|