New Musical Express
July 12, 1975

The Battle of Rutland

was fought between the faceless hordes of BBC Presentation and a renegade splinter group of Old Pythonian loonies. It was a grim war -- a dreadful encounter in which trousers were converted into sandwiches and NEIL INNES nearly starved in pursuit of a false plastic stomach.

Correspondent: Kate Phillips

"Hello
I bet
You're wondering why we're here
Sitting on our bums
Without a stitch of gear
Well as
It happens
Our budget has expired
And everything's gone back to the place where it (sic) was hired..."

THAT WAS the song which closed the last episode of Rutland Weekend Television, and a lot of people must have guessed, watching Eric Idle and Neil Innes shivering and aggrieved in their empty TV studio, that the situation they were describing wasn't entirely fictional.

The latest successor to Python, in fact, had been facing exactly the same financial trials as its imaginary broadcasting company - supposedly, of course, the most bijou in the British Isles.

"It's amazing" says Neil Innes, "how many letters we've had from people apparently convinced we were a real station operating from Rutland."

The title, indeed, was partly chosen because crew members knew they'd be working with very limited resources. Innes recalls the press preview at which the BBC bosses were congratulating themselves on producing a whole series for the cost of one Lulu Show.

"Sequins and dancers don't come cheap, you know" he adds ruefully.

The idea of Rutland, and its troubles, was born last year when Innes was appearing with the Pythons in their stage show at Drury Lane. He'd been associated with Idle for a long time, first, while with the Bonzos, in the ITV children's series "Do Not Adjust Your Sets," and later on the fringes of the Python set-up. He was never officially part of the Python organisation, but composed a lot of music for the show and toured abroad with them.

The new series was cooked up by Idle and BBC man Ian Keill, with whom he'd been working on Up Sunday. But there was a snag: The department a comedy show would normally go to is "Light Entertainment", familiarly known as "L.E." Whereas Keill's department, "Presentation", was designed to accommodate programmes of people's heads talking into microphones as exemplified by the likes of the Late Night Line-Up and The Epilogue.

So how did the Rutland team manage to produce an L.E. programme on a Presentation budget?

"We would rehearse three or four days a week, then have one lunatic day a week in the studio, trying to do one whole show. We still had to observe all the proper breaks for camera crew and the cameras had to be set up twice a day, and they were always breaking down... and if you know, you've got half of Nelson's flagship in the studio, you realise it's going to take time to get it out again. So you try to get some of the filmed stuff on tele-cine while that's going on...

And our studio was on the fourth floor, and the costumes were in the basement, so it was up and down in the lift all day. Right next door was the weather studio, and if you were lucky, and they weren't' doing any weather at the time, you could nip through there as a shortcut to Make-up. But sometimes I only realised just in time that the lights were on...

"And other things... we weren't filming in sequence, we'd be doing bits of different programmes all on the same day, so we were trying to keep tabs and not lose any bits. And there were censorship problems from upstairs, so we had to cut things and move them around..."

What with shooting up and down lift-shafts, and streaking past weather charts in their lipstick, and coping with Auntie Beeb - who wanted, incidentally, to cut the sketch about Nelson's bra and pants just before the last show went out - the team often became convinced that the show couldn't go on, and sat about giggling hysterically.

The first shows it turned out, received a record number of complaints. Which they found encouraging.

I asked Innes if he didn't get rather tired sometimes of working under these conditions.

"Not really," he said, "because I'm still anti-establishment in my approach", and he reckoned being met with flowers at the airport every time could be a bit demoralising.

"Look at Python, he said, "they'd found out the dangers of being an accepted success, and decided to hang up their hats for a while in consequence."

The latest Python film, however "Monty Python And The Holy Grail," in which Innes, besides composing the music, has several parts - "I have a cow dropped on me, and a large wooden rabbit": - was also made on a tight budget. "Reviews of it were mixed (the rudest coming from our own Tony "I laughed a couple of times" Tyler) but Innes thinks it turned out pretty well, under the circumstances.

"I can see its shortcomings as a film - it was rather wordy in places, and maybe you'd have to see it more than once to catch all the dialogue, which was excellent. The script was excruciatingly funny.

"But also, before you can criticise it, you've got to remember that there we were, clattering all over the Scottish highlands, taking over villages, and if we missed anything in the day, we'd had it. We couldn't afford to go back and re-shoot. The fact that we got so much done was good."

Python-type humour is notoriously patchy, but the musical parts of Rutland Weekend were undoubtedly among the best. Innes says he was pleased with three of the programmes, and thought the other three were as good as could have hoped for, but he can't remember which was which because, true to the chaotic nature of the whole enterprise, they weren't made and shown in the same order.

The triumph of the whole thing, as far as I was concerned, was the pastiche of the "Old Gay Whistle Test" with its dead, motionless singer displayed in frenetic TOTP camera angles, and Idle's Bob Harris, perched between two silent sleeping interviewees, breathing "Wow... I could go on rapping like this all night."

The Harris take off, in fact, was particularly deadly, and I remember thinking at the time that if Bearded Bob himself, who makes a brief appearance in the sketch, had really known what was going down, his subsequent acquiescence was the most slavish thing I'd ever hear of.

Innes admitted that Bob, whom he described as "very brave", hadn't actually seen Idle's impersonation with he played his own part. He maintains, not very convincingly, that the sketch only amounted to 'mild teasing', saying of the OGWT team, "They're all right, you know, they're 'Presentation" as well, and had the next studio to us.

"We used to shout abuse and friendly banter over the partitions."

Another highlight was the Gary Glitter spot on the first show, performed by "Stoop Solo". Innes seems to have a talent for writing better music than the stuff he parodies (and on Rutland he was helped in its execution by a guitarist of some excellence, Andy Roberts, from Plainsong and the Grimms tour.)

As I arrived at his overflowing house in Lewisham last week, he was engaged with an extravaganza called "Elvis and the Disagreeable Backing Singers", possibly destined for the new series of Rutland in the autumn, about a star with a Jordanaires-type backing group who get tired of their lowly position, and sing defiance instead of choruses.

I asked whether writing exclusively for Rutland brought any lack of inspiration; and he said no, things occurred to him like mad, that it was rather a nuisance really and he sometimes wished it would stop. Because it made him a compulsive worker.

"I suffer from rhyming couplets, you know. If I can't think of anything good, I write something really bad and its generally quite funny. I've written the world's worst song, "One Two Three, Lay One On Me"; it goes:

Verse: Life is such a lonely road
Full of little ups and downs
Some say it's a deadend street
But they are silly clowns.
Chorus: One two three, lay one on me
One two three, lay one on me
Three four five, watch me come alive
One to three, lay one on me

The disastrous thing is that you can almost make it sound presentable, with a few stompings and hey hey heys in the background.

"What I want to do with my songs, I suppose, is to take on as big a subject as possible and do it in the most direct way.

"Recently I wrote one called "God Is Love", inspired by two things: an appalling religio/rock show called "Godrock" that I saw on Sunday TV, and seeing "God Is Love" written up on a lavatory wall among all the other graffiti.

"It's the idea that the Beatles could heal cripples, that Lennon could solve world problems - I want to be an objective voice in all this fantasy that goes on between the public and their stars. Because there's not a shred of stagestruckness about me. I see no glamour in the business at all.

"I only keep doing it because the alternatives aren't too thrilling."

Teaching art and nine to fiving are the only alternatives to performing that Innes can see, so he reckons he'll have to continue, if only to stop the writing piling up, unperformed, in the front room. But he says he's actually "quite shy" and absolutely helpless when it comes to dealing with something like fanmail - "I just write back and say, "Are you sure its not going to be too boring, starting a fanclub for me, I am over 30 you know?" ^*1

"But I don't want to be a director. When you get into bizarre musical areas like mine, there's no satisfactory notation to explain exactly how it should be played, so it's easier to get up and do it yourself."

Besides, he can't afford to give up performing. I asked whether the pay for Rutland was comparable to its budget, and he said he thought he got about the same as a Ford worker - "but I don't get a free car." ^*2

Still he'd also said, speaking of his professional money worries, "I like the struggle. It keeps you toned up".

"Our hospitality's all drunk
Our producer's done a bunk
Our director's lying down with an aspirin
The man who is in charge
Of all the furniture ^{* 3}  has a large
Question mark hanging over him
(and his future)..."

*1:   He was 30 and 6 months to be exact

*2:  Ford workers didn't get free cars either

*3:  "All the money has a large", not furniture! I mean!  See the entire Song O' The Continuity Announcers

See the Rutland Weekend Television Photo Gallery

Or the Old Gay Whistle Test Pictosketch (Very Graphics-intensive)