TELEVISION

Wednesday, March 20

THE AVENGERS (ABC, 7:30-8:30 p.m.).*The last adventure for Mrs. Emma Peel (Diana Rigg), who discovers that her husband, long presumed dead, has been found in the Amazon region. In to replace her as John Steed's (Patrick McNee) partner: Tara King (Linda Thorson), who will take a more curvaceous approach to sleuthing than did Karate Expert Emma.

THE ABC WEDNESDAY NIGHT MOVIE (ABC, 8:30-11 p.m.). Harlow (1965), starring Carroll Baker, with Martin Balsam, Red Buttons, Angela Lansbury and Peter Lawford.

CHRYSLER PRESENTS THE BOB HOPE SHOW (NBC, 9-10 p.m.). Bob's guests are Actresses Anne Bancroft and Jill St. John, and Soul Singer Lou Rawls.

THE JACK BENNY SPECIAL (NBC, 10-11 p.m.). Lucille Ball, Johnny Carson, Ben Blue and Paul Revere and the Raiders join Jack on the midway for "Jack Benny's Carnival Nights," featuring cameo appearances by Bob Hope, Dean Martin, Danny Thomas and the Smothers Brothers in the guise of assorted sideshow performers and carny characters.

Thursday, March 21

NBC CHILDREN'S THEATER (NBC, 7:30-8:30 p.m.). "The Reluctant Dragon," Kenneth Grahame's classic about a boy who befriends a peaceful dragon and prevents St. George from slaying it, is brought to life by Kukla, Fran, Ollie and the other Kuklapolitan Players.

CBS THURSDAY NIGHT MOVIES (CBS, 9-11 p.m.). Ingrid Bergman, Yves Montand and Tony Perkins form the lovers' triangle in Goodbye Again (1961), based on a novel by Francoise Sagan.

Friday, March 22

HIGHLIGHTS FROM THE RINGLING BROS.

AND BARNUM & BAILEY CIRCUS (NBC, 8:30-9:30 p.m.). Presenting, from Baltimore, the 1968 edition of "the greatest show on earth," featuring an array of acrobats, trapeze artists, daredevils and clowns and a caravan of animal acts. And in the cen ter ring, Mike Douglas as host.

BELL TELEPHONE HOUR (NBC, 10-11 p.m.). "Opera: Two to Six" starts with a Tosca duet by Joan Sutherland and Tito Gobbi, grows into the trio from Faust, the Verdi quartet from Rigolctlo, a Wagner quintet from Die Meistersinger, and finally the sextet from Donizetti's Lucia di Lammcrmoor, in which the two are joined by Nicolai Gedda, Jerome Mines, Mildred Miller and Charles Anthony.

Saturday, March 23

NATIONAL INVITATIONAL BASKETBALL TOURNAMENT (CBS, 2-4 p.m.). Finals of the 31st annual postseason tournament pitting two of the nation's top college teams against each other.

ABC'S WIDE WORLD OF SPORTS (ABC, 5-6:30 p.m.). National Tourist Trophy Motorcycle championship from Gardena, Calif.; International Ski Flying championship from Mittendorf, Austria.

Sunday, March 24 THE CBS CHILDREN'S FILM FESTIVAL (CBS, 4-5:30 p.m.). Hand in Hand. A Jewish girl and a Roman Catholic boy become friends in this 1961 film from Britain.

NBC EXPERIMENT IN TELEVISION (NBC, 4:30-5:30 p.m.). "Theater of the Deaf." Arthur Penn, Joe Layton and Gene Lasko direct handicapped actors in scenes from South Pacific, Hamlet and Kismet. Nanette Fabray narrates.

THE 215T CENTURY (CBS, 6-6:30 p.m.). "New Industries" examines how cryogenics, microelectronics and advances in synthetics will affect the industry of the future.

THE ED SULLIVAN SHOW (CBS, 8-9 p.m.). Nancy Sinatra, Diana Ross and the Supremes. and Spanky and Our Gang provide a foundation of rock for this week's show, which also stars Jimmy Dean and George Carlin.

THE HIGHLIGHTS OF THE ICE CAPADES (NBC, 9-10 p.m.). Comics Rowan and Martin co-host an abridged edition of the 28th annual Ice Capades. Joanie Sommers and the Harper's Bizarre pitch in with songs.

ABC SUNDAY NIGHT MOVIE (ABC, 9-12 p.m.). Guys and Dolls (1955) with Marlon Brando, Frank Sinatra, Jean Simmons and Vivian Blaine.

Monday, March 25

ARMSTRONG CIRCLE THEATER (ABC, 9:30-11 p.m.). Robert Goulet, as a latter-day Petruchio, and Carol Lawrence, as the shrew he tamed, star in a new TV adaptation of the Cole Porter musical, Kiss Me, Kate.

Tuesday, March 26

HOW LIFE BEGINS (ABC, 7:30-8:30 p.m.). Commercial TV's first documentary on the subject examines the process of reproduction in single-celled organisms, plants, animals and humans. The film footage includes the mating displays of butterflies and prairie hens, as well as a human birth photographed at New York's Flower and Fifth Avenue Hospitals.

TUESDAY NIGHT AT THE MOVIES (NBC, 9-11 p.m.). Stranger on (lie Run, an original TV movie, with Henry Fonda, Anne Baxter, Michael Parks, Dan Duryea and Sal Mineo.

CBS NEWS SPECIAL (CBS, 10-11 p.m.). Britain's Lord Snowdon photographed and directed this documentary on the problems of aging. Such diverse figures as Field Marshal Montgomery, Noel Coward, Cecil Beaton, Sculptress Barbara Hepworth and Twiggy voice their thoughts in "Don't Count the Candles."

THEATER

On Broadway THE GUIDE is a showcase for Pakistani Actor Zia Mohyeddin, who gives an electric performance as a jailbird mistaken for a holy man by the people of an Indian village. He is having a ball, until a drought and a misunderstanding force him into a real Gandhi-type fast. The play itself, adapted by Harvey Breit and Patricia Rinehart from a novel by R. K. Narayan, is disappointingly thin in emotion and thick in talk.

PORTRAIT OF A QUEEN is part dear-diary journal and part dusty political imbroglios, but mostly a record of a woman who also happened to be Queen Victoria. Dorothy Tutin wears the role like a tiara, moving from a spoiled child of power to a yielding, sensuous wife to a desolate widow with the fatigue of existence in her voice.

PLAZA SUITE. If hotel walls had ears and Neil Simon's comic prowess--they might tell tales as mirth provoking as these three one-act plays. Directed by Mike Nichols, Suite manages to exercise the funny bone while keeping a sympathetic finger on the human pulse.

THE PRICE. Arthur Miller again walks the treadmill of filial duties and familial guilts as two brothers (Pat Hingle and Arthur Kennedy) meet in the attic of their former home to evaluate the. monetary price of their possessions and the existential cost of their choices.

JOE EGG. Peter Nichols takes audacious risks in his play about a couple with a spastic child, putting an innately tragic situation through vaudevillian turns. Albert Finney and Zena Walker make the transitions between clowning and enduring with skill and taste.

ROSENCRANTZ AND GUILDENSTERN ARE DEAD. British Playwright Tom Stoppard has chosen Hamlet's scapegoats to get across his metaphysical message regarding the futility of many lives and the inevitability of death. He is well served~by the adept acting of Brian Murray and John Wood and the dynamic direction of Derek Goldby.

THE APA has three offerings thus far this season: Pantagleize, a fantastic farce by the Belgian Michel de Ghelderode; Exit the King, lonesco's stark philosophical play about death; and The Show Off, George Kelly's soft-spoken domestic drama of 1924. They make a bright dramatic palette.

Off Broadway

YOUR OWN THING adds beat to the Bard as it madly mixes media and mischievously juxtaposes Elizabethan and modern attitudes for a groovy replay of Twelfth Night.

P:I NEMA

THE SECRET WAR OF HARRY FRIGG. Paul Newman plays a buck private who is suddenly promoted to two-star general on a World War II assignment so far behind the lines that he almost comes out on the other side.

THE TWO OF US. Writer-Director Claude Berri has made a funny and charming film about, of all things, antiSemitism; he owes his success largely to two outstanding character actors, Michel Simon, 73, and Alain Cohen, 9.

POOR COW. Carol White plays slob and sexpot, worried mum and girl in love, in this saga of life in a scruffy London slum, a first film by 30-year-old TV Director Kenneth Loach.

THE GRADUATE. Mike Nichols' second screen effort begins as genuine comedy, soon degenerates into spurious melodrama, although Dustin Hoffman, Anne Bancroft and Katharine Ross do an excellent job as victims of a sophomoric love triangle.

IN COLD BLOOD. Capote's nonfiction novel has, in the hands of Director Richard Brooks, become a first-rate movie although it suffers, ironically, from self-conscious filmishness.

THE PRODUCERS. Zero Mostel and Gene Wilder play two Broadway producers in this disjointed and inconsistent movie, which, in spite of its many faults, occasionally rises to classic comic heights.

PLANET OF THE APES. This science-fiction film represents the expenditure of $1.000,000 to make Maurice Evans look like an orangutan, Kim Hunter and Roddy Mc-Dowall look like chimpanzees, a large cast look like other assorted members of the monkey family, and Charlton Heston look like an astronaut.

BOOKS

Best Reading

THE RETURN OF THE VANISHING AMERICAN, by Leslie A. Fiedler. Ever the academic gadfly, Fiedler now argues that the Indian is the central figure in American mythology and that his spiritual heir is today's hippie.

THE GHOST IN THE MACHINE, by Arthur Koestler. A reasoned diatribe against the hubris of the scientific establishment, whose horizons, says the author, have outstretched its vision.

COCKSURE, by Mordecai Richler. Satirist Richler's basic weapon is seductio ad absitrdum in this stylish spoof of the communications industry and pop culture.

THE HOLOCAUST, by Nora Levin; and WHILE SIX MILLION DIED, by Arthur D. Morse. More grim evidence that the Allies wrote off the Jews as war casualties after having failed to face their plight in the '30s. The U.S. Congress, F.D.R., and especially the State Department come in for some scalding rebukes.

VANITY OF DULUOZ, by Jack Kerouac. Still another in the seemingly endless run of the ex-beat prophet's autobiographical novels. Few writers have asked their memory to speak more often, and the wonder is that Kerouac's replies are still fresh.

DEATH IN LIFE: SURVIVORS OF HIROSHIMA, by Robert Jay Lifton. A Yale research psychiatrist's study of 75 hibaku-sha--survivors of Hiroshima, the greatest unnatural disaster in history. He finds them contaminated by the psychic radiation of guilt, simply because they lived on after their city was annihilated.

THE NAKED APE, by Desmond Morris. A whimsical book of pop science about the sexiest primate of them all: man.

THE CONFESSIONS OF NAT TURNER, by William Styron. A shattering fictionalization of the futile 1831 Negro slave revolt in Virginia, based on the confession of the man who led it.

Best Sellers

FICTION 1. The Confessions of Nat Turner, Styron (2 last week)

2. Vanished, Knebel (1)

3. Myra Breckinridge, Vidal (4)

4. The Tower of Babel, West (6)

5. The Exhibitionist, Sutton (7) 6. Topaz, Uris (3)

7. Christy, Marshall (5) 8. The Instrument, O'Hara

9. The Gabriel Hounds, Stewart 10. The President's Plane Is Missing,

Serling (9)

NONFICTION 1. The Naked Ape, Morris (1)

2. Between Parent and Child, Ginott (2)

3. Nicholas and Alexandra, Massie (3) 4. Our Crowd, Birmingham (4)

5. Tolstoy, Troyat (5) 6. The Way Things Work: An Illustrated Encyclopedia of Technology (6)

7. Gipsy Moth Circles the World, Chichester

8. The Economics of Crisis, Janeway (8)

9. The English, Frost and Jay 10. Thomas Wolfe, Turnbull (7)

*All times E.S.T.

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