The sketch was the work of Innes and Idle. Innes was the musician and composer for Rutland Weekend Television, and he routinely created songs along with ideas of how to present the songs on the show. After writing "I Must Be In Love", Innes conceived parodying the film "A Hard Day's Night", because he felt the song sounded very "Beatle-y". He passed the idea of a Beatles spoof along to Idle, who had a separate idea about a boring TV documentary maker, and they merged the ideas into a single extended sketch for the TV show. The "Rutles" band name was a running joke based on the regional premise of the TV show, which was presented as a programme by a fictional TV station based in Rutland, the smallest county in England. The initial idea had been to do a parody of the Rolling Stones called the Rutland Stones but, when it became a parody of the Beatles, Idle suggested the name "Rutles". 'The Prefab Four' is a play on the Beatles' nickname 'the Fab Four' with an additional subtext: a prefab was a cheap postwar form of British housing, intended to be temporary, often poorly constructed, draughty and leaky, and not well-regarded by those who had to live in them.