Rutles 2: Can't Buy Me Lunch (Above Average Productions, Broadway Video, Rutle Corps, Warner Bros. TV, NBC-TV, 2003)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2026 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night at about 9:45 p.m. Charles and I had finished dinner and were ready to watch a movie. Since he’s expressed interest in lighter fare, I picked out Rutles 2: Can’t Buy Me Lunch, the 2003 sequel to the marvelous 1978 TV-movie The Rutles: All You Need is Cash. The original Rutles film is the first “mockumentary” at once depicting a fictional rock band and lampooning it – This Is Spinal Tap (1984) usually gets the credit for that, but Eric Idle and Gary Weis beat Rob Reiner by six years. It was also a beautiful coming together of the original casts of Monty Python’s Flying Circus and Saturday Night Live for a spoof making fun of The Beatles but also paying loving tribute to them, especially in Neil Innes’s songs, which cleverly tweaked the Beatles’ oeuvre and managed to sound “right” and original at the same time. Charles and I got Rutles 2: Can’t Buy Me Lunch as a bonus item when I ordered the original The Rutles: All You Need Is Cash on DVD, and for some reason the version they got was significantly abbreviated: the running time listed on imdb.com for Rutles 2 is 84 minutes but the version we got was just over an hour. It showed Eric Idle, who directed (solo this time) as well as starring as a mock newscaster hosting yet another documentary about The Rutles, the infamous “Pre-Fab Four” (actually The Monkees, the fictional rock band organized by Columbia Pictures for a TV series that lasted two seasons, were also nicknamed the “Pre-Fab Four”) from Rutland, England who conquered the world’s culture and changed the face of music as we knew it. It wasn’t quite as funny as it was the first time round (sequels usually are, though I can think of at least three movie sequels that surpassed their originals: The Bride of Frankenstein, Ivan the Terrible: Part Two, and The Godfather: Part Two), and all too much of it just repeated gags that were done better and funnier in the first film. One new gag was that Eric Idle as Melvin, the narrator, was continually being attacked by another, much younger newscaster who’s also doing a documentary about The Rutles and going to the same places he is. This character is played by the young Jimmy Fallon and gets into a series of knock-down drag-out fights with Idle until at the end it’s revealed [spoiler alert!] that he’s really Idle’s long-lost son, and the two hug. This part reminded me of the Monty Python sketch “Wicker Island,” in which the joke was that the entire population consisted of newscasters continually trying to interview each other.

Part of the poignancy of this film is in the many people featured in the cast who have passed on since, including Robin Williams (brilliantly cast as a German scholar who keeps veering off the Rutles’ history to talk about other things), Carrie Fisher, David Bowie (who thinks Idle is there to interview him about his own music and abruptly ends the interview when he realizes all Idle wants to ask him about is The Rutles), Mike Nichols, and Neil Innes, who wrote the marvelous pastiche songs sung by The Rutles. Innes actually had a connection with the real Beatles; he was in the Bonzo Dog Band, which played a number in the film Magical Mystery Tour alternately called “Baby, Don’t Do it” and “Death Cab for Cutie.” (The later title was ultimately used as a name for an entirely different band, founded in 1997 in Bellingham, Washington.) This film also went into more detail about the private life of the Rutles’ manager, Leggy Mountbatten (patterned after the real Beatles’ manager, Brian Epstein), and in particular his sexual orientation. One interviewee said Leggy knew what sort of men girls would be attracted to because he was attracted to them himself – though the real Brian Epstein went quite the other way in his attractions, towards “rough trade” men who often beat him up after having sex with him. (One of the most interesting stories about Epstein is that when he went on vacation in Spain with John Lennon, when the two were eating in restaurants together Lennon kept asking him how he decided which men were sexually attractive. Obviously Lennon was treating it as a sort of anthropological expedition, investigating what turned a Gay man on and comparing it to what Lennon, a straight man, found attractive about particular women.) There were also some interesting interviews with Billy Connolly, playing himself as a Scottish actor, singer (he had a 1960’s hit in Britain covering, of all songs, Tammy Wynette’s “D-I-V-O-R-C-E”), entertainer, and game-show host who was put in to be the contrarian voice denouncing everything the Rutles ever did, said, sang, performed, or acted. Aside from that it was an O.K. documentary spoof which fulfilled my hope for giving Charles and I a nice light evening’s entertainment to take his mind off his current health issues, even though it was hardly at the level of the savagely brilliant original!