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).
One of BOC’s most locally notable sketches was the “Golden Dome Heist,” which aired in 1980. Company members report that some South Benders actually believed it was a real news report, and they called into the station and even contacted the police for more information. “It sounds almost too incredible to be true,” indeed.
BOC’s own War of the Worlds scenario also reportedly got the attention of the FCC, which reminded the station that it was a regulatory violation to purport to break into regular programming with breaking news when it was in fact “fake news.” As ever, BOC was ahead of its time.
For the rest of time, I’ll think of Notre Dame as “a place where education is synonymous with learning.” Also, maybe when my book is out, the university will replace Mary at the top of the Dome with a giant-sized bust of Rita Moreno for just a few days to help me publicize it.
According to Tim Daugherty, who portrayed commenter Ralph R. Glunk, his character was based on WGN’s elder statesmen commenter Len O’Connor. News anchor Wendell Baker was played by Circus Szalewski (née Dennis Mooney), while the pawn shop scene featured Heidi Moser as Barbara Brambell, reporting live from Big Ben’s Big Barter Pawn Shop in Bremen and interviewing Ben Buchanan (alliteration fans, rejoice!), who was played by Daniel Waters.
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!)
