Wednesday, January 18 CBS SPECIAL: CINDERELLA (CBS, 7:30-9 p.m.).* -- Rodgers and Hammerstein's musical version of the glass-slipper classic written in 1957 specially for TV and starring Ginger Rogers, Walter Pidgeon, Celeste Holm and Lesley Ann Warren. Repeat.

CHRYSLER PRESENTS THE BOB HOPE CHRISTMAS SPECIAL (NBC, 9-10:30 p.m.). Highlights from Hope's holiday tour of military bases in Guam, Thailand, the Philippines and Viet Nam. Among Bob's troupers: Phyllis Diller, Vic Damone, Reita Faria (Miss World), and Les Brown and his Band of Renown.

Thursday, January 19

THE CBS THURSDAY NIGHT MOVIES (CBS, 9-11 p.m.). My Geisha (1962), with Shirley MacLaine whooping it up in kimono and wig.

TO SAVE A SOLDIER (ABC, 10-11 p.m.). Henry Fonda narrates a documentary recording the everyday heroism of helicopter pilots, doctors and flight nurses in Viet Nam. Repeat.

THE AVENGERS (ABC, 10-11 p.m.). Britain's upper-crust spy chasers, John Steed and Emma Peel, return to save democracy--or at least Her Majesty Diana Rigg and Patrick Macnee star in the first episode, "From Venus with Love."

Saturday, January 21

A.F.L. ALL-STAR GAME (NBC, 4-7:30 p.m.). Stars of the American Football League's Eastern and Western Divisions in their regular postseason Donnybrook at California's Oakland-Alameda County Coliseum.

Sunday,January 22

THE CATHOLIC HOUR (NBC, 1:30-2 p.m.). The third of a four-part series entitled "The Church and War"--this one focusing on "The Modern World" from the 17th century to World War II.

N.F.L. ALL-STAR PRO BOWL (CBS, 4 p.m. to conclusion). The National Football League's Western Division and Eastern Division All Stars battle it out in an exhibition game at the Los Angeles Coliseum.

BING CROSBY PRO-AM GOLF CHAMPIONSHIP (ABC, 5-7 p.m.). Final rounds of the annual tournament at Pebble Beach, Calif. Don Massengale is defending champion.

THOROUGHBRED (NBC, 6:30-7:30 p.m.). Racing Hall of Fame's Jockey Eddie Arcaro traces the story of a young thoroughbred named Stamp Act from birth to his first big race as a two-year-old in last summer's Saratoga $25,000 Special, in which he placed fifth.

THE LUCILLE BALL COMEDY HOUR (CBS, 9 10 p.m.). Lucy, as boss of a TV production studio, chases Bob Hope from Alaska to the Philippines before she signs him to do her "special" in "Mr. and Mrs." Repeat.

THE SUNDAY NIGHT MOVIE (ABC, 9-11 p.m.). High Society (1957), with Grace Kelly forced to choose between such suitors as Frank Sinatra and Bing Crosby.

Monday, January 23

FAMILY AFFAIR (CBS, 9:30-10 p.m.). In this episode, Bill Davis' priceless butler, French, is unexpectedly called away and his brother Nigel (John Williams) offers to fill in as chief cook, bottlewasher and lion tamer in the motherless household of a boy and two girls--all of which leads to complications, especially when a group fishing trip is in the offing.

Tuesday, January 24

CBS NEWS (CBS, 10-10:30 p.m.). Harry Reasoner and Andrew Rooney join forces for another essay: "The American Woman." What is she really like and what does she think of herself?

THEATER On Broadway

THE HOMECOMING, by Harold Pinter, is a trifle trickish and studied, but it is distinctly unlikely that Broadway will see a play surpassing it in dramatic quality during the current season. This mesmeric drama is innately primitive, Oedipal, and conjugal, and its mythic war between the sexes ends up as that war always does: no winners, all wounded.

AT THE DROP OF ANOTHER HAT brings an antipodal pair, Michael Flanders and Donald Swann, back to Broadway once more with a jaunty, sly revue in what they call "the theater of kindness." They scramble their comic omelet with such pixy princeliness that It becomes a royal banquet of mirth.

THE STAR-SPANGLED GIRL. Two earnest, impoverished and slightly manic intellectuals (Anthony Perkins and Richard Benjamin) are brought to their knees by an All-American girl swimmer (Connie Stevens) who has muscles in her head as well as her arms. While the whip of wit does not crack as in his past hits, Neil Simon remains an agile jokemaster in the Broadway ring.

I DO! I DO! has an undone book, badly done music, and smashingly done performances by two megatons of the U.S. musical stage, Mary Martin and Robert Preston. The Fourposter, on which thfs tale of a long-married, much-loving couple is based, is little more than a prop for their talents.

WALKING HAPPY is the poverty-to-prosperity saga of a Lancashire bootmaker whose station in life is raised through no fault of his own. Norman Wisdom is by all odds the hottest property of this warming musical.

CABARET utilizes expressionistic techniques to re-create the frenzied, bitter gaiety of prewar Berlin. While its framing is brilliantly brassy, its moods strikingly defined, the subject matter of the book is dull and amorphous.

THE SCHOOL FOR SCANDAL and RIGHT YOU ARE. Sheridan's bastion of busybodies provides a showcase for the comic talents of the APA repertory company, and Pirandello's dramatic investigation into the nature of reality affords them the opportunity to keep the philosophical ball rolling with a light touch.

THE KILLING OF SISTER GEORGE. Frank Marcus turns a harsh spotlight on a radio heroine (Beryl Reid), who plays a selfless nurse on the air--and then performs in private life as a violent lesbian terrorizing all who cross her path.

Off Broadway

EH? If Pinter and the Marx Brothers collaborated on a comedy, and dread and menace were laughing matters, Eh? might be the result. Dustin Hoffman is properly sinister and silly as Henry Livings' pop protagonist.

AMERICA HURRAH. Playwright Jean Claude van Itallie casts a searing eye and scathing glance at the contemporary American landscape for an inventively rewarding evening of modern theater.

RECORDS

Teen Hits

HUMS OF THE LOVIN' SPOONFUL (Kama Sutra) includes the latest chart climber, Nashville Cats, which exhibits the Spoonful's sunny, homespun country manner. The group is as versatile and high-spirited as any in folk-rock, and their latest "goodtime music" ranges from the symphonette sounds of Summer in the City, complete with auto horns and a pneumatic drill, to the African-inspired Voodoo in the Basement, played on steel drums and a wastepaper basket. Scarcely hum drums.

SUNSHINE SUPERMAN (Epic). The fellow the kids know as Donovan, who made his fame as a sort of Scottish Dylan ("You fill your glasses with the wine of murdered Negroes"), has forsaken protest for the pipes of a psychedelic Pied Piper, leading his myriad followers to a never-ever land of "velvet thrones" and "cascading crystals" via "trans-love airways." "I will bring you gold app-uls and grapes made of rubies" he chants, weaving a seamless tapestry of fairy tales with titles like Legend of a Girl Child Linda and The Fat Angel.

PROJECTIONS (Verve Folkways). This newly successful Manhattan quintet is known as the Blues Project. But they project more than the blues in their second album, veering toward jazz in Flute Thing, trying out Oriental effects in Steve's Song, and every so often forsaking music of any kind for a cacophony of electronic chortles, whinnies, plunks and sizzles.

THE BEST OF HERMAN'S HERMITS, VOL II (MGM). The Hermits are still the Cub Scouts of rock 'n' roll, gentle, boyish and earnest. Sample homilies from Herman, sung to a junior Beatle beat: "Everybody's got to lose somebody sometime" (from Listen People) and "Make the most of lovin' if you're not prepared to die" (from This Door Swings Both Ways).

THE TEMPTATIONS GREATEST HITS (Gordy). Rhythm 'n' blues is the growing noise nowadays, challenging rock 'n' roll on the charts, and no group is truer blue or more insinuatingly rhythmic than the five Temptations. Eight of the dozen songs are by Bill "Smokey" Robinson, including those catchy classics from an earlier album, The Temptations Sing Smokey: The Way You Do the Things You Do and My Girl.

CINEMA

GRAND PRIX. With the help of Cinerama, Metrocolor and Super Panavision, Director John Frankenheimer has captured much of the excitement--and all of the noise--in last year's nine-race Grand Prix competition for Formula One racing cars. Top billing goes to Yves Montand, James Garner, Eva Marie Saint and Francoise Hardy, but the true stars are the cars, performing in some of the most spectacular sequences ever filmed of metal in motion.

BLOWUP. For his first English-language film, Italian Director Michelangelo Antonioni develops a closeup of a young, successful pop photographer who accidentally records a murder while snapping candids around London. Though all the elements for an ingenious thriller are at hand, Antonioni underplays the whodunit and focuses instead on his characteristic concern: the gap between seeing and feeling.

GAMBIT. Michael Caine and Shirley Mac-Laine are paired as a burglar and his accomplice in this nonchalant comedy about "the perfect crime." Set in Hong Kong and the Middle East, the plot is a series of twists and turns that culminates in five possible endings, all incredible but still fun.

A MAN FOR ALL SEASONS. Acclaimed as one of the best films of 1966, this screen adaptation of the Broadway play chronicles the tragic story of the conflict between Sir Thomas More (Paul Scofield), a noble Christian who must stand fast to his principles, and Henry VIII (Robert Shaw), a childlike King who must have the obedience and approval of his subjects.

BOOKS

Best Reading

DEATH ON THE INSTALLMENT PLAN, by Louis-Ferdinand Celine. This scabrous recollection of a wretched Parisian childhood, first published in 1936, has become the schoolbook of black humorists from Genet to Bruce Jay Friedman. The new, unexpurgated translation is by Ralph Manheim.

RAKoSSY, by Cecelia Holland. A wild fictional ride through 16th century Hungary in which Magyar does in Magyar until the Turkish invaders put a temporary end to it all at the battle of Mohacs.

HAROLD NICOLSON: DIARIES AND LETTERS, 1930-1939, edited by Nigel Nicolson. A rare and engaging eyewitness account of the turbulent '30s, culled from the correspondence and journals of a civilized Englishman who seemingly went everywhere and knew everybody.

PAPER LION, by George Plimpton. Though he was a miserable failure as temporary last-string quarterback for the Detroit Lions, Plimpton succeeded in using his adventure to write the most authentic book to date about pro football.

LETTERS OF JAMES JOYCE, edited by Richard Ellmann. The letters show the terrors and jealousies that were transformed into irony and humor in Joyce's great novels.

SATORI IN PARIS, by Jack Kerouac. The zestful, pie-eyed piper of the beats relates the details of a wacky safari to France in a vain effort to track down some supposedly noble Kerouac ancestors.

Best Sellers

FICTION 1. The Secret of Santa Vittoria, Crichton (2 last week)

2. Capable of Honor, Drury (3)

3. Valley of the Dolls, Susann (1)

4. The Mask of Apollo, Renault (5)

5. The Birds Fall Down, West (4)

6. The Fixer, Malamud (6)

7. Tai-Pan, Clavell (7)

8. All in the Family, O'Connor (8)

9. The Captain, de Hartog

10. A Dream of Kings, Petrakis (9)

NONFICTION

1. Everything But Money, Levenson (1)

2. Games People Play, Berne (3)

3. The Boston Strangler, Frank (6)

4. Rush to Judgment, Lane (2)

5. Paper Lion, Plimpton (5)

6. With Kennedy, Salinger (7)

7. The Jury Returns, Nizer (4)

8. Random House Dictionary of the English Language (8)

9. Winston S. Churchill, Churchill

10. How to Avoid Probate, Dacey (10)

* All times E.S.T.

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