Radio: Woman’s Home Companion

“Radio doesn’t grab you like TV,” says NBC’s President Sylvester L. (“Pat”) Weaver. “It’s more like a companion.” It’s as a companion that Weaver wants to use it—to get back an audience which

NBC radio no longer has. For years American women, busy at their daytime chores, have cold-shouldered network radio while flirting with independent radio stations. Weaver’s scheme for wooing the ladies back: “Friendly penetration.”

Weekday is the name of Weaver’s new woman’s home companion. A variation of Monitor, NBC’s weekend guide to fun and frolic, Weekday bounces around all day long (10:156 p.m.), five days a week (Mon.-Fri.). Its appeal to housewives, mothers, matrons and maids is contained in the show’s opening lines: “Don’t stop! Don’t look! Listen!”

Holding the lengthy show together are Margaret Truman and Mike Wallace, acting as one team, and Martha Scott and Walter Kiernan as another. Crisply and in friendly fashion, they present a bit of everything—news, music, chatter, celebrities, cooking hints, cliff-hanger serials, fashion notes, lectures on human relations. To keep the women listening, NBC has well chosen its No. 1 team.

Mike Wallace is a smooth professional with an uninhibited delivery; Margaret Truman is perky and unaffected. Together they conduct smooth and alert ad-lib interviews.

Margaret, 31, who lives in a bachelor apartment in Manhattan, though she still visits Independence, Mo. about four times a year and votes there, is excited about her new job, believes that the regular hours will be good discipline for her. “I need eight to ten hours’ sleep,” she says, “and haven’t been getting it. I’m at the studio by 9 a.m., on the air all five days from 10:15 to noon, then again from 2 to 3:30. Frankly, I thought it was going to be a grind. But I’m having fun. I love being a performer. Once I start talking, everybody says they can’t shut me up.”

Margaret sounded fine last week as she chatted with Playwright Thornton Wilder (“I adore Thornton Wilder”) and Pianist Liberace (“extremely gracious”). The week before, when the show got off to a fast start, she had sounded just as good chatting by phone with Jimmy Durante. Margaret: “Thanks for calling, Jimmy. You’re the most.” Jimmy: “It’s the least.”

Weekday is short of being the most, but it is brisk, friendly and a lot freer and livelier than the old-style radio show with its predestined hourly, half-hourly and quarter-hourly breaks. It remains to be seen whether it will capture and hold the vast daytime, weekday audience of American women.