The most important event on TV this week is, unfortunately, only available to those who can tune in New York's WNEW or Washington's WTTG. It is the BBC's magnificent production of The War of the Roses. Royal Shakespeare Company Director Peter Hall has lashed Shakespeare's history plays into a single drama more than ten hours long, which will be broadcast in three parts at monthly intervals. Part 1 is presented on Sunday, Feb. 13, 8-11:30 p.m.*

Wednesday, February 9 I SPY (NBC, 10-11 p.m.). In "Turkish Delight," Diana Sands plays a shapely Israeli agronomist and Victor Buono an overstuffed Ottoman.

Friday, February 11

NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC SPECIAL (CBS, 7:30-8:30 p.m.). "The Voyage of the Brigantine Yankee,'" narrated by Orson Welles, is about 19 young Americans on an 18-month windjammer cruise from Gloucester, Mass., to the Galapagos, Pitcairn, Melanesia, Bali and beyond.

Saturday, February 12 THE HOLLYWOOD PALACE (ABC, 9:30-10:30 p.m.). Aaron Copland's A Lincoln Portrait, in words and music, with Edward G. Robinson as narrator.

Sunday, February 13

LOOK UP AND LIVE (CBS, 10:30-11 a.m.). Ossie Davis and Ruby Dee read from Black Boy, Richard Wright's autobiographical account of the plight of the slum Negro.

DIRECTIONS '66 (ABC, 1-1:30 p.m.). "The Tough and Joyful World of James T. Farrell," a dramatized look at the feisty author of Studs Lonigan.

THE TWENTIETH CENTURY (CBS, 6-6:30 p.m.). "What a Way to Run a Railroad." a report on supertrains around the world, including the 125-m.p.h. Tokyo-Osaka Express and San Francisco's Bay Area Rapid Transit.

BELL TELEPHONE HOUR (NBC, 6:30-7 p.m.). Julie Harris is the heart of this musical valentine.

THE FBI (ABC, 8-9 p.m.). Coleen Dewhurst plays a psychotic baby sitter with leanings toward kidnaping. She leans a little too far, and dum-dee-dum-dum.

Monday, February 14

GENE KELLY IN NEW YORK, NEW YORK (CBS, 10-11 p.m.). Kelly dances from Kennedy Airport to the U.N., Greenwich Village, the Museum of Modern Art, the Plaza Hotel and the Bitter End, among other places, and is joined along the way by Woody Allen, Gower Champion, Damita Jo and Tommy Steele.

Tuesday, February 15

ANATOMY OF POP: THE MUSIC EXPLOSION (ABC, 10-11 p.m.). Tony Bennett, the Dave Clark Five, Duke Ellington, the Supremes, Richard Rodgers, Gene Krupa and Billy Taylor in a joint lecture on the Big Beat.

CBS REPORTS (CBS, 10-11 p.m.). "The Divorce Dilemma," a study of the New York law which, by making adultery the sole legal ground for dissolving a marriage, has helped create a new social phenomenon: migratory divorce.

THEATER

On Broadway

THE PERSECUTION AND ASSASSINATION OF MARAT AS PERFORMED BY THE INMATES OF THE ASYLUM OF CHARENTON UNDER THE DIRECTION OF THE MARQUIS DE SADE. The inventive direction of Peter Brook and the superb performances of the Royal Shakespeare Company players as madmen in a masque make exciting theater out of Peter Weiss's philosophical drama.

INADMISSIBLE EVIDENCE. John Osborne has orchestrated the plight of a man out of tune with his time, working in themes of frustration and painful self-recognition, building to a crescendo of despair. Actor Nicol Williamson is the commanding virtuoso.

CACTUS FLOWER. Barry Nelson as a playboy dentist who must persuade his spinsterish nurse (Lauren Bacall) to fill in as his "wife" because his mistress (Brenda Vaccaro) won't agree to marry him until she meets his supposed spouse. Daft farce, deftly directed by Abe Burrows.

YOU CAN'T TAKE IT WITH YOU. High spirits and high jinks are the household gods of the blithe Sycamore family. The 29-year-old play is an American comedy classic, though its zaniness is now less remarkable than its nostalgic evocation of an age of innocence.

THE ROYAL HUNT OF THE SUN is a dazzling theatrical spectacle but fails to touch the nerve center of drama. Still, Christopher Plummer gives a forceful interpretation of the stormy Conquistador Pizarro in Peru.

RECORDS

Choral & Song

LEONARD BERNSTEIN: CHICHESTER PSALMS (Columbia). For last summer's music festival in Chichester, England, Bernstein set to melody half a dozen Psalms, to be sung in Hebrew. The composition (TIME, July 23) is both literal and theatrical. "Make a joyful noise unto the Lord" calls forth a jazzy outburst. After a boy alto sings, "The Lord is my shepherd," a men's chorus, heavy with percussion, crashes in to ask "Why do the nations rage?" The 18-minute work is less tortured musically than Bernstein's Kaddish of 1963 and is well performed by the Camerata Singers and the New York Philharmonic, Bernstein conducting.

MONTEVERDI: IL BALLO DELLE INGRATE (Nonesuch). This musical play of 1608 taught the ladies of the Duke of Mantua's court a moral: Make love or you will go to Hades. As horrible examples, Pluto brings up from his dark kingdom an eternally damned bevy of pale beauties who, when on earth, "ungrateful, held every lover at a distance." Edwin Loehrer and the chorus and orchestra of the Societ`a Cameristica di Lugano give the embryonic opera a convincing performance.

SONGS OF SCANDINAVIA (London). Birgit Nilsson, the Swedish farmer's daughter, puts aside the superhuman passions of Wagner's Valhalla to sing most expressively some quiet love songs and mystic reveries about the fir forests, mists and dripping rocks of Scandinavia. Seven songs are by Sibelius, three by Grieg, and four by the little-known Swedish songwriter and symphonist, Ture Rangstroem.

BRITTEN: CANTATA MISERICORDIUM (London). Written for the 1963 centenary of the founding of the Red Cross, the cantata retells, in Latin, the parable of the good Samaritan. Shorter and less dramatic than Britten's widely performed War Requiem, it is nevertheless eloquent as performed by the London Symphony orchestra and chorus, conducted by Britten, with Peter Pears as the Samaritan and Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau as the Jewish traveler.

HAYDN: THE CREATION (2 LPs; Decca). One of the last great works of the skeptical 18th century was this triumphant affirmation of Haydn's faith. Translated from the German and sung clearly in English, the oratorio will seem especially vivid to U.S. listeners because the music so closely fits the words. One hears the tawny lion roar, the insects swarm and the tiger leap for the first time on earth. Frederic Waldman conducts the Musica Aeterna Orchestra and Chorus, and Soprano Judith Raskin, as Gabriel, sings brilliantly, at times eclipsing her more earthbound fellow archangels, Tenor John McCollum and Bass Chester Watson.

DELIUS: SONGS OF FAREWELL (Angel). "How sweet the silent backward tracings!" Walt Whitman's verses begin. Delius was blind when he wrote this tone poem for double chorus and orchestra, with its sliding harmonies complex in texture yet as delicate as sighs. Sir Malcolm Sargent conducts the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra and the Royal Choral Society.

CINEMA

KING AND COUNTRY. Director Joseph Losey (The Servant) unfolds the pity-and-terror-filled tale of a World War I deserter (Tom Courtenay) who is doomed to die, and of the British officer (Dirk Bogarde) who is doomed to defend him.

THE FLIGHT OF THE PHOENIX. Survivors of a plane crash in the Sahara, among them James Stewart, Hardy Kruger and Richard Attenborough, struggle to construct an airworthy vehicle from the wreckage and work up plenty of excitement in the attempt.

OTHELLO. As Shakespeare's Moor of Venice, Laurence Olivier makes this filmed stage production a spectacular display of virtuosity, though he spends so much of his talent impersonating a Negro that the characterization often seems skin-deep.

DOCTOR ZHIVAGO. In Director David Lean's literate, magnificently visualized version of Boris Pasternak's novel, the romance of Zhivago (Omar Sharif) and his Lara (Julie Christie) dominates a vast canvas of war and social upheaval.

OHAYO. The easy rhythm of middle-class existence in suburban Tokyo is the plot and soul of a gentle family comedy by the late Yasujiro Ozu, Japan's most celebrated film poet.

THUNDERBALL. Sean Connery's alter ego, James Bond, is back with a treasury of wishfulfillment and a nickel's worth of plot, something about a couple of stolen atomic bombs.

THE SPY WHO CAME IN FROM THE COLD. Espionage made grim, grey and as engrossing as it was in John le Carre's novel, with Richard Burton perfectly cast as the worn-out British Intelligence hack on a fateful mission behind the Berlin Wall.

DARLING. This bittersweet satire sheds crocodile tears for a jet-set playmate (Julie Christie) who lives and learns that a girl who is no better than she should be can do very well indeed.

JULIET OF THE SPIRITS. Director Federico Fellini (8 1/2) stages a psychic three-ring circus in the mind of a troubled matron, played by Giulietta Masina.

BOOKS

Best Reading

A VISION OF BATTLEMENTS, by Anthony Burgess. Published 16 years after it was written, this early satirical distillation of Burgess' comic imagination is worthy of his later (1963) Orwellian Clockwork Orange. A Vision unfolds the misadventures of a mild-mannered sergeant in the British Army Vocational and Cultural Corps who muddles through World War II in the incongruous bastion of imperial Britannia atop the rock of Gibraltar.

SWANS ON AN AUTUMN RIVER, by Sylvia Townsend Warner. One of Britain's master short-storytellers shows that she has lost neither her deft cruelty nor her wise compassion in picturing human fallibility.

IN COLD BLOOD, by Truman Capote. Whatever it is called--and its author calls it a "nonfiction novel"--this meticulous reconstruction of a multiple murder in Kansas elevates journalism to art.

A THOUSAND DAYS: JOHN F. KENNEDY IN THE WHITE HOUSE, by Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. Other New Frontiersmen stood closer to the President, but none were better equipped than Harvard Historian Schlesinger to describe the moods and assess the deeds of the Kennedy Administration, and none have done so more successfully.

THE PROUD TOWER, by Barbara Tuchman. In The Guns of August, Historian Tuchman presented a perceptive and appalling analysis of the military catastrophe of 1914. In the present sequel, she steps back a few years and examines with equal sharpness a luxurious and unheeding Europe as it drifted toward disaster.

BERNARD SHAW: COLLECTED LETTERS (1874-1897), edited by Dan H. Laurence. The first of four volumes takes Shaw from adolescence to the early years of fame and glamour in London. A tireless and brilliant correspondent who bridled neither mind nor emotions, he pursued subjects ranging from love to Fabianism to the evils of drink.

Best Sellers

FICTION

1. The Source, Michener (1 last week)

2. Those Who Love, Stone (2)

3. The Lockwood Concern, O'Hara (3)

4. Up the Down Staircase, Kaufman (4)

5. The Double Image, Maclnnes (9)

6. The Billion Dollar Brain, Deighton (6)

7. Thomas, Mydans (8)

8. Airs Above the Ground, Stewart (5)

9. The Rabbi, Gordon

10. The Magus, Fowles

NONFICTION

1. In Cold Blood, Capote (2)

2. A Thousand Days, Schlesinger (1)

3. The Proud Tower, Tuchman (5)

4. Kennedy, Sorensen (4)

5. Games People Play, Berne (3)

6. A Gift of Prophecy, Montgomery (6)

7. Yes I Can, Davis and Boyar (8)

8. The Penkovskiy Papers, Penkovskiy (7)

9. A Gift of Joy, Hayes (9)

10. Is Paris Burning? Collins and Lapierre (10)

* All times E.S.T.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.