In South Bend, Indiana, they're warming up the gala tenth anniversary season of one of the nation's most unusual local shows.
It's a weekly comedy show--an unusual project in itself for a local station to attempt. It has been, at one time or another, variously likened to "Laugh-In" and "Monty Python's Flying Circus" and "NBC Saturday Night." Actually, it predates all of these, and sports its own distinctive style of parody, music and experimental film.
The half-hour show is SRO for commercial advertisers, and in 1973, the National Association of Television Program Executives called it the nation's beat locally- produced variety show in its market class. It has earned the kind of national publicity most local shows only dream of: TV Radio Mirror, Parade, Seventeen and TV Guide, to name a few magazines who have featured the show.
But the most unusual thing about the program is its cast and crew: none of them is over 18 years old!
The program is called "Beyond Our Control" and it is the end product of a broadcast education project sponsored by WNDU-TV, the University of Notre Dame's NBC affiliate in South Bend. Each year, 30 area high school students, ranging in age from 14 through 18, are selected to take part in the organization. Working with 3 adult advisers from WNDU-TV, the students write, film, produce, perform and direct the weekly show.
The fledgling TV stars, handpicked from about 150 applicants each year, begin work in June, shooting on-location 16mm film. Last summer's project, for example, was a five-chapter mythological serial, starring a muscular hero confronted with a Medusa who turned mortals into Jell-0, a torturous Amateur Hour of the Gods, and a quest for the Treasure of the Gods: a Spiegel catalogue and a $50 gift certificate. Needless to add, everything on the show is done with tongue firmly in cheek.
At summer's end, the students, reinforced by new members recruited in September, troop into the campus studios of WNDU-TV for a crash course in audio and video technology. Within weeks, the students are operating cameras, audio consoles, videotape recorders and video switchers like pros, and by November, regular Saturday morning taping sessions are underway.
Meanwhile, the students are knocking on the doors of the area's leading retailers and advertising agencies, peddling the more than 120 advertising availabilities for the show's 13-week season. Unlike many broadcast education projects, "Beyond Our Control" is also a business education. WNDU-TV General Manager Tom Hamilton insists that the students learn about the economics of broadcasting, and has chartered his project under the aegis of Junior Achievement, a nationwide program of economics education.
"Beyond Our Control's" tenth anniversary season will probably continue in the screwball tradition of previous years, which featured such bits as: "The Legend of Bimbo," a Disney-style true adventure about a wild table lamp (yes, table lamp) caught in a poacher's trap; a commercial for "April Euphemism," a feminine product so sensitive in nature that the ad refused to admit the product's purpose; "House, 1999," a futuristic adventure in which an atomic furnace blasts a bungalow and its inhabitants into outer apace; "Theatre of the Dead," featuring a predictably inanimate cast of corpses; and a laxative commercial that graphically compared constipation to a traffic jam in the Holland Tunnel.
As wild as the action usually is, the cast and the staff of the show are dead serious about the project and surpassingly professional for their age. Charged with the formidable responsibility of meeting a weekly program deadline, they deliver the complex half-hour show...edited and ready to roll... on time every week.
All in all, it's a remarkable example of broadcast education..and proof beyond any doubt that an educational project for teen-agers need not be dull for viewers.
