Danger with Granger

Steve Grainger was a typical hard-boiled detective, whose cases involved crimes from murder, to robbery, to smuggling. The series came much later in the golden age of radio, and sadly seemed to have 'missed the boat' in the hard-boiled detective genre, as it never saw the success of its predecessors.

Your description of DANGER WITH GRAINGER states that it was a very late addition to the American radio-detective genre, too late to make much of an impact -- but that is not quite accurate. By the summer of 1956, when GRAINGER premiered on Mutual, the network (or really, its home-base crew at New York's WOR) had pretty much abandoned in-house dramatic production in favor of an ever-increasing emphasis on newscasts, talk shows and sports, although management had, well before the other networks, long been open to scheduling pre-packaged/syndicated programs produced and transcribed out-of-house -- if the price was right or a sponsor insisted. And that's what DANGER WITH GRAINGER was: a syndicated package of less than thirty episodes, produced a few years earlier (when private eyes were "all over the dial") but never before heard on any American station or network.rnrnThe reason: it was an Australian production, written, produced and performed by a talented group of Aussies whose "stock company" of voice actors included several who had learned to imitate Yank dialects almost flawlessly. The cast was headed by the highly gifted mimic Ray Barrett, whose later career in London would make him one of British television's most acclaimed and popular character actors of the 1960s and 1970s.rnrnOne clue (as to the show's non-AFTRA origins) is the total absence of performer credits, a union-contracted "must" in the final years of America's golden-age radio; another is the "slightly British" tone of the briefly heard announcer who opens each episode. And close examination of the pronunciations of the supporting performers occasionally reveals a fleeting "flattened A" or "softened R" -- but overall the illusion is quite convincing. All the episodes circulating among OTR collectors appear to be taken directly from the syndication recordings and never from Mutual-affiliate airchecks, so it might be "most interesting" (as Steve Grainger would say) to hear how commercial (or PSA) insertions and network ID's were handled in this country -- if such an aircheck does someday turn up. The historical record should, indeed, be set straight on this very clever simulation of an American-radio production. I first became suspicious of the show's origin way back when, as a radio-crazed kid in the early 1960s I heard re-runs of it on a few 50kw (nighttime sky-wave) stations such as KSTP and WLW. They were also re-running, in addition to the Charles Michaelson-revived domestic titles (SHADOW, GREEN HORNET, etc.) some of the Harry Alan Towers (made in London) syndicated shows (THIRD MAN, BLACK MUSEUM, SECRETS OF SCOTLAND YARD, etc.) -- so whenever a slightly "off" pronunciation caught my teenage ear, I chalked it up to the likelihood that GRAINGER was also a product of that once-busy "Towers of London" radio-drama factory, which reportedly rented studio facilities at the BBC to record programs which would, ironically, later be played on "the Beeb's" only serious, 1950s-era rival for domestic listeners, ultra high-powered Radio Luxembourg. But that was not the case. The detective series actually came from "Down Under"! It was only decades later, after I had become a college professor teaching media courses (including Broadcasting History) that I discovered and read Ray Barrett's autobiography. What a remarkable guy! And before his stellar, character-acting career in Britain he had been one of Australian radio's top voice talents, a master of dialects and mimicry with a range as broad and convincing as, say, Peter Sellers, Rich Little or Frank Gorshin. One of these days I intend to dig deeply into the archives of both the American general-news press and its specialized show-biz publications, circa 1956, to see if there's any mention, any acknowledgement at all, of Mutual's airing an imported private-eye series that "pretends" to be a Stateside creation. Was everyone (everyone who was still listening to prime-time radio drama, that is) fooled? Did the Mutual time slot even have a sponsor?

Danger with Grainger is a great detective show. It is not listed in Dunning’s Encyclopedia of Old Time Radio and the radio personalities are not listed or known. I think the producer wanted to get around some type of regulation regarding pay. I had never heard of the program and ran across it. It is well worth the buy.