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. Despite many calls, none of the episodes have been released on DVD - the show has complicated rights issues, belonging in principle both to the BBC and Idle, but with issues concerning appearances by former-Beatle George Harrison and the songs of Neil Innes. Innes has claimed that Idle has no interest in seeing the series released as it reminds him of an unhappy time in his life, but recent litigation and bitterness concerning The Rutles spin-off may also be a consideration.

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 real television broadcaster London Weekend Television (London at the time being covered by two ITV franchises, Thames Television broadcasting Monday to Friday, and LWT at weekends). 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 1 — 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 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.'" 2