Wednesday, May 22

THE UNDERSEA WORLD OF JACQUES COUSTEAU (ABC, 7:30-8:30 p.m.).* The rebroadcast of the opening program, "Sharks," shows flipper-tipped explorers fearlessly aswirl in a terrifying assortment of hammerheads, blue whalers, tiger and white-tipped sharks.

Friday, May 24

THE BIG LITTLE WORLD OF ROMAN VISHNIAK (NBC, 7:30-8:30 p.m.). Considered one of the foremost photographers of microscopic life, the 70-year-old biologist and zoologist developed a method called "colorization." With this unique process, he transforms scientific subjects into an art show while examining the complex life of microorganisms. Dr. Vishniak's life and work are put under the TV microscope in this color special.

TOMORROW'S WORLD: A NEW ERA IN MEDICINE (NBC, 10-11 p.m.). Frank McGee reports on some of the techniques being developed to diagnose obscure diseases and to use computers in new ways in medicine. Among those interviewed: Drs. Christian Anfinsen and Edward Evarts of the National Institutes of Health, Dr. Leo Tick of New York University, Dr. John C. Seed of Montefiore Center in New York City, and Dr. Jerome Lettvin of M.I.T.

Saturday, May 25

ABC'S WIDE WORLD OF SPORTS (ABC, 5-6:30 p.m.). The Rugby League Cup Final play-off at Wembley Stadium, London. The players don't wear padding, but they do handle the ball, and sports fans will detect some similarity to U.S. football.

Sunday, May 26

NEW YORK PHILHARMONIC YOUNG PEOPLE'S CONCERT (CBS, 4:30-5:30 p.m.). The fourth of this season's concerts is a "Quiz-Concert," in which Conductor Leonard Bernstein asks the audience (and the viewer who is invited to participate at home): "How Musical Are You?"

Monday, May 27

THE EARLY EVENING NEWS (ABC, 7-7:30 p.m.). A look at the little Red schoolhouse. Moscow is the location for this first of a five-part series showing education in the Soviet Union.

Tuesday, May 28

CBS REPORTS: CAMPAIGN AMERICAN STYLE (CBS, 10-11 p.m.). Can an almost unknown candidate become a potential winner in eight months? Jay McMullen and Eric Sevareid zoom in on "the new politics," to show how public relations, advertising and other image makers can "create" a politician--in this case, Sol Wachtler, now a New York State Supreme Court judge. Last November, he became a manufactured but very real threat to New York's Nassau County Executive incumbent, Eugene Nickerson.

Check local listings for date and time:

NET JOURNAL (shown on Mondays).

"From Protest to Resistance." Three advocates of dissent -- Mario Savio, who led the Free Speech Movement at the University of California in Berkeley, Black Power Pusher Stokely Carmichael, and David Harris, a full-time antidraft resistance worker--have their say in a program about the new radicalism.

THEATER

On Broadway HAIR. Now that the hippie notion is fading away, a slickly packaged version of hippiedom has swung onto Broadway. The songs rock, the expletives explode and the energetic cast exuberates--but so quickly does U.S. society shift that the play's style of dissent is already dated. Director Tom O'Horgan achieves startling production effects even though distraction is certainly no substitute for destination.

JOE EGG. Humor is one way to meet an insoluble obstacle and ease insupportable pain. Peter Nichols' tender play tells of a shaky marriage held together by a spastic daughter. Donal Donnelly and Zena Walker deftly balance laughter and pain.

ROSENCRANTZ AND GUILDENSTERN ARE DEAD is this season's winner of the Drama Critics' Circle Award and the Tony. From Shakespeare's clay, Tom Stoppard has fashioned two contemporary characters of existentialist angst, Beckettian apprehensions and undergraduate wit.

Off Broadway

THE MEMORANDUM. Director Joseph Papp introduces Czech Playwright Vaclav Havel to the U.S. with this wacky and pointed satire on bureaucracy and its bombast. Robert Ronan is pluperfect as the prissy pedant of Ptydepe, an artificial office language in which "ah" becomes "zukybaj," "ouch" becomes "bykur," "oh" becomes "hayf dy doretob."

MUZEEKA has as its hero Jack Argue. He composes rapturous songs from the words on a penny and dreams of being an ancient Etruscan, but he spends his life as an employee of a piped-in music firm and dies in Viet Nam with a unit assigned to fight before NBC cameras exclusively. John Guare's debut as a playwright displays a store of rich imagery and imagination.

THE BOYS IN THE BAND. Mart Crowley s comedy makes no apologia for the homosexual society, but uses it as a frame within which to hang the skeins of diverse lives, while unraveling some of the knots in which human beings tie themselves. Leonard Frey, Kenneth Nelson and Cliff Gorman lead an exemplary ensemble through assaults of sharp-edged humor and barrages of put-down gags.

JACQUES BREL IS ALIVE AND WELL AND LIVING IN PARIS and--one hopes--writing more of the poetic and potent songs that are transmitted by a quartet of empathetic interpreters.

RECORDS

Soul

LADY SOUL (Atlantic). When ex-Gospel Singer Aretha Franklin sings the blues, they are likely to pour forth wild, bright and triumphant. Aretha's big voice soars and loops and knifes through a swinging rock combo as she sings her own hit, Since You've Been Gone, and her sister

Carolyn's plaintive outcry, Ain't No Way. Then there is Chain of Fools, with its heavy rhythm and mesmerizing chant ("Chain, chain, chain") by the harmonious quartet known as The Sweet Inspirations. AXIS: BOLD AS LOVE (Reprise). Soul gone psychedelic? Oldtime Blues Singer Muddy Waters recently sounded the death knell of his own brand of blues: "They ain't no more of our kids comin' up. They been havin' too good a time." Jimi Hendrix, whose recording this is, learned guitar from Muddy Waters records, but Muddy never taught him to pluck the strings with his teeth or elbows. Wild as his act is onstage, Hendrix on this LP sings lyrics that are at times as delicate as Donovan's, and his blues are just one stripe in a rainbow of euphonious effects.

A PORTRAIT OF RAY (ABC). Ray Charles, after more than a dozen years as the soul of soul, presents a rather touched-up portrait today. His once rough edges are smoothed out, but he is still one of the most convincing singers on records. He inflects his lines freshly, and with faultless timing underlines every nuance--whether in warm pop like Yesterdays or pale blues like Never Say Now. As a member of the interracial musical exchange, Charles now borrows the sweetly lyrical Eleanor Rigby from his long-term debtors, the Beatles.

THE DOCK OF THE BAY (Volt). The title song, Otis Redding's first million-selling single, was recorded a few weeks before his death in a plane crash last December. One of his catchiest and most reflective songs, it has none of the torrential outbursts and piston rhythms with which he electrified his audiences from Paris to Monterey during his brief reign as the crown prince of soul. But the album has other cuts of more typical pounding blues (I'm Coming Home and Don't Mess with Cupid), as well as some lighthearted badinage with Carla Thomas (Tramp).

CINEMA

2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY. This stunning film by Director Stanley Kubrick sets out to define man's past and describe his future with a combination of visual pyrotechnics and subtle metaphysics.

LES CARABINIERS. Jean-Luc Godard's artful discourse on the brutalizing effects of war is quite possibly the director's best film since Breathless.

THE RED MANTLE. This Danish-Swedish film is a beautiful, occasionally bloody saga of the conflict of love and honor in medieval Iceland.

THE FIFTH HORSEMAN IS FEAR. A brutal tale of the Nazi occupation of Czechoslovakia is raised to a high level of creative cinema by Writer-Director Zbynek Brynych's stark symbolism.

THE ODD COUPLE. An alimony-poor sportswriter (Walter Matthau) and his divorce-bound buddy (Jack Lemmon) are at each other's throats again in this almost literal translation of Neil Simon's Broadway hit. Actor Matthau's comic genius makes amends for the static mise en scene. BELLE DE JOUR. Ranging easily from anticlerical broadsides to highly polished pornography, this bizarre tale of the sexual fantasies of a beautiful young wife (Catherine Deneuve) makes a fitting capstone to the 40-year career of Spanish Director Luis Bunuel.

HOUR OF THE WOLF. Sweden's Ingmar Bergman relates another of his parables of the dark night of the soul in this eerily symbolic tale of the deepening madness of a reclusive artist.

NO WAY TO TREAT A LADY. In this black and bloody comedy, a callow New York City cop (George Segal) dogs the elusive tracks of a killer (Rod Steiger) who uses a closetful of disguises.

BOOKS

Best Reading

KING, QUEEN, KNAVE, by Vladimir Nabokov. The eternal love triangle gets some witty edition of twists a in novel this first written in 1928, English-language when the Russian-born prose master was a 28-year-old emigre living in Berlin. A CAB AT THE DOOR, by V. S. Fritcnettist's. The notable brilliantly British belligerent literary account of critic-essay youth spent in genteel poverty ensured by the non-efforts of his cocky, cocky, job-hoping father. THE ARMIES OF THE NIGHT, by Norman Mailer. The authors "egoisms of curious disproportions" casts him as the mock hero of last fall's peace march on the Pentagon, in a literary tour de force that owes less to journalism than it does to the novelist's gift for relevant distortion. LYTTON STRACHEY, by Michael Holroyd. The author of Eminent Victorians was the oddest duck on the Bloomsbury pond a fact amply documented on nearly ever one of the 1,229 fascinating pages of this two-volume biography. COUPLES by John Updike. Mate swaping is the game described in living off color, but soul saving is the real stake this rich and subtly rewarding novel by the crown prince of American letters.

THE LITTLE DISTURBANCES OF MAN, Grace Paley. Life's daily tussles find resonance and importance in these short stories by an author gifted with acute perception and and a supple, colloquial style. T.H. White, by Sylvia Townsend Warner. The latter-day pursuer of Camelot was himself chased by demons darker than Merlyn ever dreamed of, and all of them are brought to light in an affectionate but unsparing biography. TUNC by Lawrence Durrell. In prose as complex as the computer that plays the villain the wizard of Alexandria expostulates a comic chapter in the continuing epic of man v. his machines.

Best Sellers

FICTION 1. Airport, Hailey (1 last week) 2. Couples, Updike (2) 3. Myra Breckinridge, Vidal (3)

4. Topaz, Uris (6)

5. The Tower of Babel, West (4)

6. Vanished, Knebel (5)

7. Testimony of Two Men, Caldwell (10)

8. The Triumph, Galbraith 9. Tune, Durrell 10. Christy, Marshall (7) NONFICTION 1. The Naked Ape, Morris (1) 2. Between Parent and Child, Ginott (2) 3 Our Crowd, Birmingham (4) 4 Nicholas and Alexandra, Massie (5) 5. The Double Helix, Watson (3) 6. Iberia, Michener 7. Gipsy Moth Circles the World, Chichester (6) 8. The Way Things Work: An Illustrated Encyclopedia of Technology (8) 9 The English, Frost and Jay (9) 10. Kennedy and Johnson, Lincoln (7)

*All times E.D.T.

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