Wednesday, January 1

COTTON BOWL FOOTBALL GAME (CBS, 1:45 p.m. to conclusion).* Texas v. Tennessee, from Dallas.

SUGAR BOWL FOOTBALL GAME (NBC, 1:45 p.m. to conclusion). Georgia v. Arkansas, from New Orleans.

CBS NEWS CORRESPONDENTS REPORT: PART 2 (CBS, 4:30-5:30 p.m.). Walter Cronkite moderates as Eric Sevareid, Roger Mudd, Mike Wallace, Dan Rather, Daniel Schorr and John Laurence report on the U.S. in 1968 and the prospects for 1969.

ROSE BOWL FOOTBALL GAME (NBC, 4:45 p.m. to conclusion). Ohio State v. U.S.C., from Pasadena.

ORANGE BOWL FOOTBALL GAME (NBC, 7:45 p.m. to conclusion). Penn State v. Kansas, from Miami.

Thursday, January 2

MARK TWAIN TONIGHT (CBS, 7:30-9 p.m.). Hal Holbrook's enchanting portrayal of the great author and humorist. Repeat.

Friday, January 3

PRUDENTIAL'S ON STAGE (NBC, 8:30-10 p.m.). "Male of the Species," narrated by Sir Laurence Olivier, is a three-episode comedy-drama that details a Scotswoman's (Anna Calder-Marshall) relationships with her hard-drinking father (Sean Connery), a charming Irish swain (Michael Caine), and a wily Welsh barrister (Paul Scofield).

Saturday, January 4

NATIONAL HOCKEY LEAGUE (CBS, 4-6:30 p.m.). Chicago at Montreal.

SHELL'S WONDERFUL WORLD OF GOLF (NBC, 5-6 p.m.). Billy Casper, Gene Littler and Ben Arda compete at the Manila Golf and Country Club in the Philippines.

THE HUNTLEY-BRINKLEY REPORT (NBC, 6:30-7 p.m.). The dynamic duo now makes the scene six nights a week.

Sunday, January 5

DISCOVERY, '69. (ABC, 11:30 a.m. to noon). "Backyard Odyssey," Part 1, investigates the wonderful world of insect and animal life found in any garden backyard; the "stars" of this show are a Monarch butterfly, a grasshopper and a praying mantis.

N.F.L PLAY-OFF BOWL (CBS, 1 p.m. to conclusion). Runners-up in the Eastern and Western Conferences meet in Miami's Orange Bowl Stadium.

N.B.A. BASKETBALL (ABC, 5 p.m. to conclusion). The Boston Celtics v. the Warriors at San Francisco.

THE KILLY STYLE (CBS, 5-5:30 p.m.). Gold Medalist Jean-Claude Killy takes viewers along as he skis some of the most difficult slopes in the world. First show in the series is a trip to New Zealand's North Island, where he skis down an active volcano. Premiere.

CBS NEWS SPECIAL (CBS, 5:30-7 p.m.). "Meet the New Senators"; introduction by Correspondent Roger Mudd.

MUTUAL OF OMAHA'S WILD KINGDOM (NBC, 6:30-7 p.m.). "Hippo!" shows a relocation project, now under way in South Africa's Kruger National Park, which is moving the hippopotamus population to an area safe from poachers.

WALT DISNEY'S WONDERFUL WORLD OF COLOR (NBC, 7:30-8:30 p.m.). Zoologist Henry Del Guidice and the crew of his schooner track a giant sea turtle across 1,500 miles of open sea to study its navigational ability in "Solomon, the Sea Turtle."

MY FRIEND TONY (NBC, 10-11 p.m.). James Whitmore is a scientific crime fighter, and John Woodruff and Enzo Cerusico are his legmen in the premiere of this new mystery comedy series.

Tuesday, January 7

FIRST TUESDAY (NBC, 9-11 p.m.). Sander Vanocur is anchorman for NBC News's monthly TV Magazine. In the first issue: a report on Fidel Castro's attempts to export Cuban Communism to the rest of Latin America; a look at Hollywood Love Goddess Rita Hayworth at 50; a visit with Body-Building Expert Charles Atlas; a tour of the Sinai peninsula; and "Baton Twirlers," a feature that looks at the thousands of girls--and a few boys--who zealously practice baton twirling in the nation today.

THEATER

On Broadway

PROMISES, PROMISES follows all the hallowed tactics for promoting mediocrity into success. Jerry Orbach is splendid as the tall, gangling antihero, and Marian Mercer turns in the acting gem of the evening as an amorous alcoholic pickup. But the comic tone of Neil Simon's book is bland rather than pithy, and the songs of the Burt Bacharach score are for the most part interchangeably tuneless.

JIMMY SHINE is like a book in which the text has been thrown away and the footnotes published. Playwright Murray Schis-gal is fortunate to have Dustin Hoffman's ingratiating stage personality working for him as the luckless born loser, stumbling through episodes from his past, present and fantasy lives.

KING LEAR. Lee J. Cobb plays the most inhumanly difficult title role with an all-involving humanity in this revival by the Lincoln Center Repertory Company.

ZORBA is a sleek and synthetic musical version of the Kazantzakis novel in which Herschel Bernard! clodhops through the role of Zorba. The songs and dances, possessing neither virility nor ethnic veracity, hardly ever evoke the characteristic tone of Levantine lament.

Off Broadway

BIG TIME BUCK WHITE starts as a genial put-on with five officers of a Black Power group ricocheting around the stage in an orgy of black humor. It becomes a cold put-down with the arrival at the lectern of Dick Williams as Buck White. Answering questions from the audience that are designed to give Whitey the message about Black Power, he is more of a bore than a bombshell after the antics of the five clowns.

AMERICANA PASTORAL. When the citizens of a depressed South Carolina town find that the savior who will revive their cotton mill is black, the stage is set for a dramatic exploration of attitudes and tensions. But Playwright Yabo Yablonsky's formalistic approach to his story keeps the action in chiaroscuro.

TEA PARTY and THE BASEMENT. Harold Pinter provokes a devilishly clever sort of participatory theater in which the playgoer is lured into playing detective without any clues. In Tea Party, a middle-aged manufacturer of bidets is driven into a catatonic state by the interactions of his secretary, his wife and her brother. The Basement has two old friends vying for the affections of a girl with whom they share a basement flat.

GOD IS A (GUESS WHAT?). The Negro Ensemble Company seems to be forging a dubious tradition of brilliantly staging mediocre material. The intentions of Playwright Ray Mclver to make a cutting satire of black-white relations in the U.S. unfortunately outrun his wit. But the players, under the direction of Michael A. Schultz, endow this "minstrel-morality play" with a lively inventiveness and bounce.

ClNEMA

THE FIXER. A generally faithful and often moving adaptation of Bernard Malamud's Pulitzer Prizewinning novel about the passion of a modern Job. Under the careful and inventive direction of John Frankenheimer, the cast--notably Alan Bates, Dirk Bogarde and Ian Holm--bring to the film a moral force reminiscent of Dostoevsky.

2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY. Stanley Kubrick's epic of the space age brilliantly describes the history and future of man with some of the most mind-blowing special effects ever seen on a movie screen.

THE FIREMEN'S BALL. Director Milos Forman (Loves of a Blonde) has fashioned a frothy, funny parody-fable of Communist bureaucracy from a slight anecdote about a group of firemen who stage a party in honor of their retiring chief.

OLIVER. A gleaming Christmas package of a musical. Dickens' reformist outrage is gone, but in its place are some lovely period costumes, some excellent songs by Lionel Bart and a collection of perfectly stunning sets designed by John Box. Carol Reed directs a large cast (including Ron Moody, Shani Wallis and Mark Lester as Oliver) with wizardry precision.

YELLOW SUBMARINE is an eclectically animated voyage to Pepperland starring four cartoon Beatles. The score is mostly familiar, and the film decidedly too long, but Animator Heinz Edelmann works a few droll visual puns and some distracting graphic legerdemain,

BULLITT. A visceral cops-and-robbers saga starring Steve McQueen as a hip San Francisco police lieutenant on the hunt for assorted bad guys.

FUNNY GIRL is a loud, lumbering, almost anachronistic musical biography of Fanny Brice. Barbra Streisand's brassy talents are the none-too-firm foundation on which the film rests.

WEEKEND Jean-Luc Godard gives the bourgeoisie a good drubbing in a satire that might have been sharper had its straight-faced Maoist political harangues not been so dull

PRETTY POISON, Homicide can be fun, as Anthony Perkins and Tuesday Weld prove in this small but stinging satire on violence in America directed by Noel Black, 31 whose previous experience has been mostly in educational and commercial

shorts.

COOGAN'S BLUFF. French him critics have long hailed Director Don Siegel as a minor genius, and this film is ample proof that his reputation is no Gallic caprice. With measured professionalism, Siegel tells the story of an Arizona sheriff (Clint Eastwood) who travels to New York to extradite a prisoner.

BOOKS

Best Reading

MILLAIS AND THE RUSKINS, by Mary Lutyens. Private Lives, Victorian style, raised to the level of art, by the author's skill and the writing ability of Critic John Ruskin and his wife.

THE ARMS OF KRUPP, by William Manchester. A flawed but massive and cumulatively fascinating chronicle links Europe's most famous weaponmaking family with Germany's persistent thrust toward world power.

TURPIN, by Stephen Jones. A veterinarian and part-time lobster fisherman is caught up in ludicrous deaths and humorous depravities in this fine, satiric first novel.

THE BEASTLY BEATITUDES OF BALTHAZAR B, by J. P. Donleavy. Fumbling seductions and moneyed monkeyshines fill Donleavy's tall tale of a rich and dreamy young man in Paris, Dublin and London.

INSTANT REPLAY: THE GREEN BAY DIARY OF JERRY KRAMER. The legend of former Coach Vince Lombardi acquires a gilt-edged sparkle in this on-the-line account of the football life by the Packers all-pro right guard.

THE COLLECTED ESSAYS, JOURNALISM AND LETTERS OF GEORGE ORWELL. The cross-grained texture of the intellectual and political history of Western Europe during the '30s and '40s is brilliantly perceived through this gathering of Orwell's writings, edited and annotated by Sonia Orwell and Ian Angus.

O'NEILL: SON AND PLAYWRIGHT, by Louis Sheaffer. O'Neill did what only a major artist can do: he made his public share his private demon. In this painstaking biography, the first of two volumes, Author Sheaffer traces the tensions that define the playwright's life.

THE CAT'S PAJAMAS AND WITCH'S MILK, by Peter De Vries. In these two grotesquely humorous novellas, a gifted, discontented man works hard at being a failure, and a gentle, down-at-heart woman struggles with domestic disaster.

Best Sellers

FICTION 1. A Small Town in Germany, le Carre (2 last week)

2. The Salzburg Connection, Maclnnes (1)

3. Airport, Hailey (4)

4. Preserve and Protect, Drury (3)

5. The Senator, Pearson (9)

6. Force 10 from Navarone, MacLean

7. The Hurricane Years, Hawley (5)

8. And Other Stories, O'Hara (8)

9. Testimony of Two Men, Caldwell (7) 10. The First Circle, Solzhenitsyn (6)

NONFICTION 1. Instant Replay, Kramer (3) 2. The Money Game, 'Adam Smith' (2) 3. The Arms of Krupp, Manchester (10) 4. The Day Kennedy Was Shot, Bishop (6) 5. On Reflection, Hayes (4) 6. Sixty Years on the Firing Line, Krock (1) 7. The Rich and the Super-Rich, Lundberg 8. The Joys of Yiddish, Rosten (5) 9. The Bogey Man, Plimpton 10. Anti-Memoirs, Malraux (9)

* All times E.S.T.

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