Behind the Mike
Radio Turning the Microphone on Itself
The premise of Behind the Mike was unusually self-aware for its time: a radio program about radio. When the Blue Network revived the show on September 15, 1940, it billed itself as "radio's own show, the stories behind your favorite programs, favorite personalities, and the radio people you never hear of." That description captured something genuinely different. Where most Variety programs turned the spotlight outward — on music, comedy, drama — this one turned it inward, using the 30-minute Sunday afternoon slot to pull back the curtain on the medium itself.
The show ran unsponsored throughout its Blue Network life, a sustaining program with no commercial advertiser behind it. Each half-hour could cover as many as six separate stories or segments, moving quickly through interviews, listener letters, anecdotes, and demonstrations. A regular feature called "Correspondence Corner" answered questions from the audience. Another recurring element was a "sound effect of the week" segment that showed listeners how the illusions they heard were actually made.
The People in Front of and Behind the Microphone
What made Behind the Mike genuinely interesting was its range of subjects. The show did not limit itself to the on-air personalities audiences already recognized. It featured interviews with technicians, engineers, sound-effect artists, dialect actors, theme-music writers, imitators, and animal imitators — the workers who built the sound of radio without ever being heard as themselves. That was a real editorial choice, and an unusual one.
The guests with public profiles added a different kind of texture. Inventor Lee de Forest appeared on the program, with the show presenting his development of the audion and the "wireless telephone" as the foundation on which radio broadcasting rested. Walter Compton came on and described listener response to a story of hardship on his Double or Nothing series. Compton also served as a moderator for the series in addition to appearing as a subject, which gave the show some flexibility in its format.
Graham McNamee and Ben Grauer
The host who gave the Blue Network version its personality was Graham McNamee. By 1940, McNamee was already one of the most recognized voices in American broadcasting — a staff announcer at AT&T's WEAF as early as 1923, later an NBC fixture who had originated play-by-play sports broadcasting and served as Ed Wynn's straight man on The Texaco Fire Chief through the mid-1930s. In 1925, he won a gold cup at the Radio World Fair as America's most popular announcer, pulling nearly 190,000 votes. The October 3, 1927, cover of Time had featured his face. Red Barber, in the Scribner Encyclopedia of American Lives, called him "the greatest sports announcer we ever had."
On Behind the Mike, McNamee did what he was built for: he told stories. He shared accounts of announcer fluffs, described "what happens when a daytime serial needs firing up," and read letters from listeners on air. His co-author on the 1926 memoir You're on the Air, journalist Heywood Broun, had written that McNamee "justified the whole activity of radio broadcasting" — which gives some sense of the stature he carried into this program.
McNamee died on May 9, 1942, at St. Luke's Hospital in New York City at the age of 53, from a brain embolism following a streptococcal infection. Ben Grauer stepped in as host and carried the program through its remaining weeks. The show ran under the title Behind the Mike through April 19, 1942, then continued briefly as This Is the Truth and finally Nothing but the Truth, ending June 7, 1942.
Grauer — born Benjamin Franklin Grauer in 1908 — had joined NBC as a staff announcer in October 1930 and would remain with the network until 1973. By 1944, the National Academy of Vocal Arts had certified him as possessing the most authoritative voice in the world. Arturo Toscanini later selected him as the voice of the NBC Symphony Orchestra, a role Grauer held until the orchestra was disbanded in 1954.
What Survives
The original CBS run of Behind the Mike in 1931–32 — a 15-minute Monday night program sponsored by Frostilia — is largely lost to history. The Blue Network version is better documented, though still incomplete. Of the roughly 83 episodes that would have aired during the 1940–42 run, 32 are currently known to survive. The writing credits for those episodes include Mort Lewis and, on some episodes, Lester Lewis. Music was provided by Ernie Watson, who also served as conductor, and by Jimmy Lytell. Gilbert Martin was the announcer.
The show is modest by the standards of the era's big Variety productions, but it captured something the larger programs left unrecorded: what the people inside the radio industry thought about what they were doing, told in their own voices, week by week, while the medium was still new enough to be surprising.