Following the (temporary) demise of Monty Python's Flying Circus at the end of 1974, its various members moved on to new projects. First out of the trap was Eric Idle with this clever sketch series centred on 'Britain's smallest television network'.

The title Rutland Weekend Television - both a reference to Britain's smallest county, Rutland, which had disappeared in 1974 with the redrawing of boundaries, and a pun on the ITV Friday-Sunday franchise for the capital, London Weekend Television - was suggested by John Cleese, who, according to Idle, was paid £1 for his trouble. The concept of using a television network as a launch-pad for the sketches allowed Idle a great deal of scope to tap various subjects and areas, but, ironically, his elaborate plans were undermined by the small budget allocated to the series by the BBC. To portray a TV station struggling with a paucity of cash, Idle had, indeed, a paucity of cash; typically, he worked the cheapness of the show into a running gag.

Among the Monty Python team, Eric Idle was the only person to write alone, so he had no problems adapting to post-Python work. He also invited the fine musical wit Neil Innes (a former member of the Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band) to provide comic songs. Some excellent work emerged - Idle was brimming with ideas and seemed to have learned different styles from the other Pythons: sketches ranged from spoof documentaries to parodies of period dramas and, indeed, send-ups of all aspects of television programming. Innes, David Battley, Henry Woolf and Gwen Taylor helped perform the material and there were occasional star guest appearances, notably George Harrison in the 1975 Christmas special.

The ex-Beatle and the ex-Python had become good friends around this period, and this probably sparked the creation of a super-successful spin-off from Rutland Weekend Television: the TV movie The Rutles (aka All You Need Is Cash). This began when Neil Innes wrote a song pastiching a circa 1964 Beatles track, which was then enacted in an edition of RWT utilising the same directorial style that Richard Lester had favoured in the Beatles' movie A Hard Day's Night. On 2 October 1976, Eric Idle hosted an edition of the US comedy show Saturday Night Live, right at the time when a long-running joke in that series centred on a possible re-formation of the Beatles on the show, in return for which, generously, the Fab Four would be paid $800 a man. Asked to bring over the Beatles with him from Britain, Idle responded that he couldn't, but he could bring a great new film of them - indicating the 'Rutles' clip from RWT. The response of SNL viewers was so great that the series' producer Lorne Michaels and Idle agreed to make a full-length 'mockumentary' detailing the history of the Rutles - essentially a spoof on the Beatles' entire career - with Michaels as the producer for NBC. Made, thankfully, on a much bigger budget, The Rutles aired in the USA on 22 March 1978 and on 27 March 1978 in the UK, on BBC2. Idle directed (together with SNL director Gary Weis), wrote and also appeared in the film - as the presenter and as the Paul McCartney-like Dirk McQuickly; Neil Innes was the John Lennon-like Ron Nasty; Rikki Fataar played the George Harrison-like Stig O'Hara; and John Halsey was the Ringo Starr-like drummer Barrington Womble, alias Barry Wom. George Harrison, Michael Palin, Ron Wood, Mick Jagger, Paul Simon, and SNL regulars John Belushi, Dan Aykroyd, Bill Murray and Gilda Radner were also in the cast, in cameo roles. The film was a triumph from the first frame to the last, and a resounding success not only for Idle but also for Innes, who provided a slew of spot-on Beatles song parodies, leading to a hit album and singles; a very-long-awaited sequel album was issued in 1996. (RWT had also generated spin-offs: the book The Rutland Dirty Weekend Book and the Innes album The Rutland Weekend Songbook.)

Notes: Just before launching RWT, Idle experimented with the idea of spoof broadcasting with his BBC Radio 1 series Radio Five (six hour-long editions, 30 March-4 May 1974). The title was a play on the BBC's national radio stations, Radios 1 to 4. An actual Radio 5 has subsequently come into existence.

Neil Innes later gained his own BBC2 series, The Innes Book Of Records (17 January-21 February 1979, 2 June-7 July 1980, and 28 September-9 November 1981, a total of 18 editions) that featured original songs and weekly guest artists. The series was whimsical, with more emphasis on music than straight humour, but it did feature some comedy guests, including Rowan Atkinson, Michael Palin, Ivor Cutler, Viv Stanshall and Stanley Unwin.