In my History of Television class, we’re spending a day on 1970s local television using Beyond Our Control as our primary case study, and I’ve assigned the students this post to read about the series. It’s an adaptation of a presentation I delivered last year at the Locating Media Industries conference in London. A primary goal of the conference was to consider how a “focus on locality can help ground our understanding of how media industries are actually inhabited and lived,” so my presentation covered the local conditions that made BOC possible starting in the 1960s and how those conditions changed to bring about its end in 1986. I’ve just tinkered with the text a bit and added a list of suggested clips at the start.
I delivered a presentation this week for my department’s monthly Visual Cultures Workshop. This work emerged from my research into the origins of BOC, because in exploring the founding and evolution of WNDU, I stumbled across a parallel history of the origins of my own department, Film, Television, and Theatre. This was personally fascinating to me from the jump, and as I dug deeper, I found intriguing throughlines that connected BOC and FTT, particularly when it came to their respective relationships with WNDU and the vision for television that Father Hesburgh expressed upon the station’s dedication. Most of the FTT stuff likely won’t make it into the book, but I’ll probably pitch it to ND Magazine, since it’s a revealing slice of university and Arts & Letters history.
If you’d like to watch the narrated PowerPoint presentation, it’s embedded below. If you prefer an audio-only version, you can find it here (and from there you can download it via the down-arrow button on the top right). And if I talk too fast for you to keep up or you just favor text, you can read it here.
Because of some Zoom recording glitchiness, I cut out the clips from the video, except for at the end. If you want to see what I showed, I opened with three clips to help those not familiar with BOC understand the nature of its humor and production methods: one film-themed, one TV-themed, and one theatre-themed, in honor of FTT. The clip from the middle of the talk is an excerpt from “Donawho.” And I left in the ending clips, but the audio is faint; if you want to see them intact, you can see the original Hesburgh wraparounds here, and the final clip at the start of this (with all due apologies to those offended).
Just realized I haven’t posted in a while. A few holiday weeks off plus being buried in reading and taking notes from hundreds of documents will do that to a blog.
The documents I’m currently poring over were weekly single-page memos given the name “poop sheets” by BOC creator (and Army vet) Dave Williams, distributed to all company members across the 30ish weeks of the seasonal term. As to their function, Williams wrote at the start of the 1973-74 set: “Oftenstance, when an Achiever misses a meeting or goes into a 2-hour nod Thursday night at 7, he loses track of what the devil is going on. These weekly bulletins will help steer you in the paths of righteousness should you stray. Herein you will find announcements of meetings, special reminders, Success Hints!, typing errors, and oddments.”
Reading through these is a constant reminder of what a joy this project is for me, as both a historian and a human who is averse to boredom. In terms of the former, the poop sheets offer a treasure trove of information about each season, because Williams (and those who took over writing them after he died) meticulously detailed how things were progressing, from ad sales to production to publicity, such that you can trace out a distinctive narrative arc of progress across each season — well, usually more of a zig-zag than a neat arc. Williams describes at the end of the 1975-76 season that he used them to “congratulate, remind, philosophize, scold, amuse, announce and probably offend” as he tracked the company’s activities.
The sheets are also a tremendous testament to Williams’ ability to engage an audience stretching across the years from a 1970s teenager to a semi-senior academic fifty years later. His writing style is clever but never obtuse, and his humor is delightfully refined and silly in almost equal measure, with every sheet generating at least a few wry smiles and more than a few outright laughs. Just picking one example mostly at random from the first year’s set or I’ll never stop reading long enough to get this posted, Williams told the kids what to expect from their first attempt at selling commercial time: “Tempering somewhat that heady exhilaration which comes from walking into an Advertising Manager’s office and saying: ‘I represent WJA-TV…’ will be that magic moment when you are hurled bodily from that office with no contract” (December 11, 1967). He also skillfully highlighted well-known quotes, repeatedly using ones that seemed most germane, such as this passage written by Tom Wolfe presumably meant to point toward BOC’s love/hate relationship with the TV it ridiculed: “At the heart of every parody there is a gold ball of tribute. Even hostile parodies admit the target has a distinct voice.”
Most evidently, how much the show, the company, and the kids meant to Williams leaps off of every page, not least in the time he put into writing each sheet but most substantially in the stern yet forgiving ways in which he points out student failures. No matter how critical he was in describing how the season would be lost if the kids didn’t shape up, he was still always seeking to encourage, never to disparage. And because he was so witty, and so clearly on their side, he could call the kids out for unruly behavior without it coming across as mean-spirited, like when he wrote in March 1973 after an unproductive Saturday session: “Too much time spent on set-ups, and your little practical jokes … the cleverness of which would make you an absolute wow at any fifth grade party. (Have you tried the one where you pull the chair out from someone sitting down?).”
Williams concluded each season with a final parting thought, “much like the thoughtful mortician who checks to be sure the smile is firmly set on the corpse before he closes the lid,” he wrote in May 1976. Two years prior, he bid farewell to that season’s company with this: “It has been nearly a year since some of you walked into the interview room to face us, a recorder, a Polaroid camera and a bowl of cookies. And now, we’ve given you all that we have to give. We warned you that it would be fun, and we promised you that there would be tears, and we predicted the unpredictable. We scarred most of you psychologically … and some of you physically. We sweated, cursed, giggled, bled, threatened, apologized, sighed, cried and very nearly collapsed at times. And no one on the outside will ever understand what it’s like being on the inside.” Thanks to his prolific, expressive writing (and all the BOCers who preserved these sheets so we could read them today*), Dave Williams has at least helped me understand it a little bit.
If you’ve managed to read this far, you deserve a clip as a reward, so here’s one wherein its poop sheet apperance helped me better understand how Beyond Our Control was evolving aesthetically in the mid-1970s. In a February 1976 entry, Williams assesses a Saturday production session and laments a few sketches that were “good ideas perhaps dragged out beyond any reasonable length.” He then praises “Walsh’s Vegetables” in contrast, “with its terse, every-line-a-joke style and the visually-interesting mix of studio and film.” He continues that the lesson going forward for the show would be to produce “more short studio bits” and “more studio-film mixes and fewer long-winded pure studio bits.” I’ll have to look for how that worked in practice when I’m done with the documents and poring over video instead. In the meantime, please enjoy David Simkins as John Walsh, true vegetable lover, warning us about the sad state of endangered vegetable species. The sketch was directed by the teen David Sutton, and if you enjoy it, you have a way to reward the adult David Sutton, who became a pioneering pet photographer, author, songwriter, and builder of cigar box guitars and today could use some help.
*If you’d like to see a bunch of poop sheets, head to the BOC website and click on a season. If you want just one to see what they look like, check out the first one from the 1975-76 season. I’ll close this post out the way Williams did at the very end of that season’s poop sheets:
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.
Photo source: Elizabeth Loring. Foegley Plaza at the South Bend Civic Theatre
The primary adult advisors for BOC were Dave Williams, whose day job at WNDU was promotions director, and in terms of BOC, today we would call him a showrunner or head writer; Denny Laughlin, who was an art director for WNDU and served in that capacity for BOC; and Joe Dundon, an account executive for the station who advised the students on ad sales. Dave died in 1977, Denny died in 2000, and Joe died last week.
Because his biggest impact was behind the scenes in equipping kids with the skills needed to sell ad time, you wouldn’t necessarily see the fruits of Joe Dundon’s BOC labor on screen (outside of random bits like the clip below). Yet Beyond Our Control itself would not be on that screen without him. After all, in commercial television, the product for sale is advertising time, not the program itself, and if you don’t have advertisers on board, your show doesn’t air. However, while Joe assisted students by providing contact info and conversation templates, he left the most important stage of sales — closing — to them. As BOCer Diane Werts described it to me: “You’d call and you’d say, you know, Joe Dundon at WNDU gave me your number. I’m working on the WNDU TV show, blah blah blah, I’d like to come in and talk to you about what our show can do for you. So, yes, it gave you that level of entrée in various ways, I think. Because there was a professional organization behind all these crazy kids.”
For a show overflowing with unique aspects, its commercial foundation might be the most striking to me. There were many teen-produced media projects driven by an educational mission throughout the 20th Century in the U.S., but they were typically on non-profit and public media platforms, not a commercial network affiliate. Within the epic tussle between art and commerce that is American entertainment history, BOC is thus a lesson that the goal to earn a profit doesn’t have to override the achievement of a public good, but it does take altrustic people in positions of power to tip the balance toward the public good. Joe Dundon was one of those people.
Working with Joe, the kids learned the practical skill of selling ads, but the deeper underlying lessons were about professionalism, how to graciously represent yourself and those invested in you, how to communicate with adults, including active listening, and the value of aspiring for something beyond yourself. Joe Dundon supplied the necessary wisdom, encouragement, trust, generosity, empathy, and savvy to hundreds of teenagers to make all of that possible and thereby funneled each of those qualities back out into the public sphere through them.
It’s also fair to say that this book project wouldn’t be happening without Joe. Many BOCers have conveyed that in their post-2000 reunion era, he was the connective tissue, providing space for them to gather together during migrations back to South Bend and helping to foster a sense of community that united company members from years apart as if they had worked closely together. Joe knew everyone’s name no matter what year they were in BOC, and while that’s the mark of a good salesman, it’s also the sign of a great teacher in showing each and every student you care enough about them to remember that simple but essential detail about you. Without the now-interconnected matrix of BOCers that he helped to foster, I’d struggle to put all the necessary pieces together to tell the story of the show’s entire run, so I’ll be forever grateful to Joe for providing that glue.
Last year, I had the privilege of interviewing Joe for the project, and he told me “The only reason I did BOC was because I felt like one of them. […] I really enjoyed it. It was a creative outlet that I really enjoyed being a part of.” For my Sketch of the Moment (new name to cover for my sporadic posting, ha), here he is in an introductory opening for the 1971 season, wherein BOCers climb out of the TV set and swarm Joe and his beloved wife Viki.
Part of why I’m so excited about this project is because it’s about so much more than just one TV series; it’s also a portal into a history of local television, production technologies, and styles of comedy and evolutions in youth culture, education, and public service.
Highlighting just one small thread of the BOC tapestry in this post, nearly as unique as Beyond Our Control itself was the pedigree of the station that aired it. NBC-affiliated WNDU was owned by the University of Notre Dame from the station’s founding in 1955 until it was sold to Gray Television five decades later, and the studio was located on campus grounds until 1982. (To see where, check out the map within this post about the station’s construction and dedication.) The university’s launch of a commercial network station was so notable that WNDU’s dedication was attended by none other than David Sarnoff, head of RCA, founder of NBC, and the most powerful person in U.S. broadcasting in the 1950s. During a special academic convocation at Notre Dame on September 30, 1955, Sarnoff told the 3,000 people assembled, “Television on the campus is the modern counterpart of the blackboard and textbook. In your Convocation Program, I note Father Hesburgh’s statement that ‘a university can no more ignore television today than universities of the past could have ignored the discovery of printing.'”
WNDU would indeed help foster broadcast education in taking on Notre Dame students as interns, but nothing made more of an educational mark within those studio walls than Beyond Our Control. Creator Dave Williams and the other advisors made it the “chalkboard and textbook” that Sarnoff foretold while fostering wisdom about a lot more than just television production. Given the station’s location, it’s additionally worth noting that, due to Notre Dame admitting only men up until 1972, the teen girls who were part of BOC in its first four years would have been among the only women receiving an education on Notre Dame’s campus at that time. (Read more about the more than 4,5000 women who did actually graduate from Notre Dame before 1972 here).
Bonus material: Click the ‘Play’ icon here to listen to Father Hesburgh’s first address to WNDU audiences as the station went live on July 15, 1955.
“It is our finest hope that through the medium of television, we will be able to bring to this whole community the many fine things that Notre Dame stands for here in South Bend. We would like you to feel that this is your station, that through this station, you are brought all of the fine elements that Notre Dame does stand for, that through your cooperation, we can make this station a fine and vital influence in this community for everything that is good.” — Rev. Theodore Hesburgh, July 15, 1955
And if you’re more interested in broadcast personalities than broadcast presidents, check out WNDU’s article on another prominent pair of guests invited to campus for the festivities: Eddie Fisher and Debbie Reynolds. (This dedication was a big deal, folks!)
Photo caption: Members of the 1968-69 crew of Beyond Our Control in the WNDU-TV studio.
My name is Christine Becker, I’m an associate professor in the Dept. of Film, Television, and Theatre at the University of Notre Dame, and I’ve started this site to chronicle my process of researching and writing a book about the 1968-1986 sketch comedy TV series Beyond Our Control, which was produced in South Bend, Indiana, almost entirely by high school kids. If you don’t know what this show is, the Wikipedia page is a good place to catch up quickly, or you can check out the BOC Alumni Association’s website and its history post, or watch sketches on YouTube here, here, and here. I plan to showcase materials from all of these sources as I go, which will hopefully engage fans of the show and also help me work through ideas along the way. I encourage anyone who has thoughts or memories to share (or – the ultimate dream – intact pre-1978 episodes) to get in touch with me or add comments to a post. I want to know everything, so no comment or query is too small!
For now, I’ve pasted below the opening paragraph for a short (6000-word) essay I’ve already written about the show, which will be published in 2024 by UGA Press in a collection titled Local Television: Histories, Communities, and Aesthetics. The book version will be about a lot more than just the “intricate balance of multiple intertwined forces” that made the series possible, as it says here. The show is nothing less than a portal into the history of local TV, youth culture, comedy, education, and public service, in addition to a fascinating personal story. But hopefully this is at least an engaging tease to start.
“Imagine for a moment you’re 17 again. You’ve grown up with television as your babysitter, your educator, your entertainer. But now much of what television is doing somehow fails to interest you. You’re turning it off — simply because most of the time it’s turning you off. And then someone asks, ‘What would you do if you were given a half-hour of television time to fill each week?’ For 25 teenagers in South Bend, Indiana, that question is being asked. I’m one of those doing the asking — and we’re expecting not only a good theoretical answer, but an actual half-hour program.” — Dave Williams (1971)
Williams, Dave. 1971. “Beyond Our Control — a Junior Achievement Television Program.” Educational Television, April: 11-14.
That actual half-hour program was Beyond Our Control, a sketch comedy series that aired on WNDU-TV, an NBC affiliate in in northwest Indiana, for thirteen weekends in the first quarter of each year from 1968 through 1986. The series was a product of a nonprofit youth initiative called Junior Achievement, which aimed to teach high school students principles of economics and free enterprise. Under this mission and the guidance of creator Dave Williams and a handful of other adult advisers, South Bend-area students between the ages of 14 and 18 undertook nearly every job required to put a commercial TV series on the air, from writing scripts to operating studio cameras and switchers to selling commercial time. Beyond Our Control was billed as “A TV show about TV,” featuring parodies of local and network news, prime-time dramas, sitcoms and variety shows, daytime game shows and soap operas, B movies and art cinema, and nature documentaries and commercials, as well as the occasional epic serial, experiemental film, or animated bit. As such, the series is a remarkable document of American televisual culture across two decades, as well as a gauge of how teenagers in the Midwest assessed the entertainment in which they were steeped. Nineteen years is a very long stretch for any TV series to survive, let alone one made by teenagers with annual labor attrition enforced by high school graduation. A “good theoretical answer” is thus required to explain how the actual half-hour program worked for as long as it did, in the particular city in which it did, and in the format that it did even starting well before its famous national counterparts like Saturday Night Live were conceived. That answer is neither simple nor singular, and it demands understanding of an intricate balance of multiple intertwined forces.
