The title for Beyond Our Control stemmed from the routine announcement when a logistical or technical difficulty arose, i.e. “Due to circumstances beyond our control,” something wasn’t going as planned. CBS News producer Fred Friendly titled his 1967 book about the failings of profit-driven broadcast journalism Due to Circumstances Beyond Our Control. . ., so the saying was surely top of mind when Dave Williams and his creative team of teenagers were devising in the fall of that year what BOC would be when it started airing in January 1968.
Before they settled on Beyond Our Control, though, and even apparently before they had settled on the creative mission to parody television, Williams wrote up a memo proposing guidelines for possible titles:
I wish I could have been in the room (or in Dave Williams’ head) to learn how Beyond Our Control was chosen, but this memo gets us pretty close to the answer. A clever but not coy title that is easy to convey in publicity and raises connotations of a program offering the perspective of a spectator seeking to probe the motley sight of TV’s diversions, with an accent on the light and humorous? Beyond Our Control nailed it.
That title is also a generous gift to anyone (me) trying to analyze the meaning of everything behind the production. BOC was fundamentally about control — bestowing it upon teenagers, trusting them with it, contending with the consequences when they lost it. The “our” also signified creative ownership and empowerment while implicitly drawing lines that designated who stood beyond its boundaries. The fact that it could get beyond their control also signalled to viewers that they couldn’t predict what would appear on their TV screens next, and if they didn’t like that, well, they should take command of channel switching themselves.
Or maybe Dave Williams just thought it sounded cool? Who knows.