Thursday, January 9

THIS IS TOM JONES (ABC, 7:30-9 p.m.).* British Singer Tom Jones plays host to Guest Stars Dick Cavett, Juliet Prowse, Mireille Mathieu and The 5th Dimension.

THE WORLD WE LIVE IN (NET, 8:30-9 p.m.). "Water: Old Problems, New Methods" reviews the importance of water by showing where it comes from, and how it is used and wasted.

Saturday, January 11

SENIOR BOWL FOOTBALL GAME (NBC, 2 p.m. to conclusion). Graduating seniors compete as North meets South at Ladd Memorial Stadium in Mobile, Ala.

CBS GOLF CLASSIC (CBS, 4-5 p.m.). Harold Henning and George Knudson play George Archer and Bob Lunn in the first of a 14-round elimination match for $225,000 at the Firestone Country Club in Akron, Ohio.

SHELL'S WONDERFUL WORLD OF GOLF (NBC, 5-6 p.m.). Arnold Palmer, Gay Brewer and Juan ("Chi Chi") Rodriguez compete at the El Conquistador Hotel in Las Croabas, Puerto Rico.

ABC'S WIDE WORLD OF SPORT (ABC, 5-6:30 p.m.). The International Women's Alpine Skiing Championship from Oberstauf-en, Germany, and the Thousand-Mile Cross-Country Auto Race down the rugged Baja California peninsula from Ensenada to La Paz.

Sunday, January 12

LAMP UNTO MY FEET (CBS, 10-10:30 a.m.). A Negro community group from Chicago's South Side tells the Christmas story in original contemporary soul music in "Time Is Running Out: An Afterthought to Christmas," a swinging look at the season.

MEET THE PRESS (NBC, 1-1:30 p.m.). Senator Everett Dirksen (R., Ill.) is the guest.

SUPER BOWL FOOTBALL GAME (NBC, 3 p.m. to conclusion). The A.F.L. champion meets the N.F.L. champion in Miami's Orange Bowl.

THE ED SULLIVAN SHOW (CBS, 8-9 p.m.). The really big show goes West to give the once-over to Las Vegas' new entertainment center, Circus Circus.

Monday, January 13

THE UNDERSEA WORLD OF JACQUES COUSTEAU (ABC, 7:30-8:30 p.m.). Two sea lions, Pepito and Cristobal, make friends with Jacques Cousteau & Co. aboard the research vessel Calypso until the lure of the sea becomes stronger than human friendship.

NET JOURNAL (NET, 8-9 p.m.). "Fasten Your Seat Belts" focuses on the hazardous skies and snarled airports where air traffic grows far faster than the facilities available at present to handle it.

TO LOVE A CHILD (ABC, 8:30-9 p.m.). A study of the joys and frustrations involved in adopting a child.

KILLY LE CHAMPION (ABC, 9-10 p.m.). Jean-Claude Killy is seen on as well as off the slopes while he relaxes at parties, tries a bit of bull fighting and turns his hand to harness racing.

COSMOPOLIS (ABC, 10-11 p.m.). Architects and urban planners of today present ways of easing the choked conditions of tomorrow, including the possibility of constructing floating cities.

Tuesday, January 14

NBA ALL-STAR GAME (ABC, 8:30 p.m. to conclusion). Topnotch basketball live from Baltimore.

NBC TUESDAY NIGHT AT THE MOVIES (NBC, 9-11 p.m.). Anne Bancroft and Patty Duke both won Oscars for their roles in The Miracle Worker (1962).

THEATER

On Broadway

FORTY CARATS is a frothy French farce from Pierre Barillet and Jean-Pierre Gredy, the team that wrote Cactus Flower. Julie Harris, as a twice-divorced damsel of 40 who is wooed and won by a lad nearly half her age, proves that love is a game for all seasons. As a tonic for middle-aged matrons, the play is so potent that Producer David Merrick may have to institute extra matinees to handle the crush.

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 most of the songs of the Burt Bacharach score are interchangeably tuneless.

JIMMY SHINE is like a book in which the text has been thrown away and the footnotes published. Playwright Murray Schisgal 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.

ZORBA. Producer-Director Harold Prince has turned out a brassy bit of Broadwayana that is as far from the Mediterranean basin as is Shubert Alley. Herschel Bernardi is never really possessed by the role of the grizzled Dionysian pagan, and the bouzouki music sounds as if it were piped in by Muzak.

KING LEAR. Lee J. Cobb gives the finest performance of his career in this revival by the Lincoln Center Repertory Company. His portrayal of the blind, incurably foolish Lear has an all-involving humanity from which an audience cannot withhold some of its deepest emotions.

THE APA REPERTORY COMPANY races through Richard Wilbur's lithe translation of Moliere's The Misanthrope with a light touch. The best thing about the play is Brian Bedford's smug Acaste.

Off Broadway

DAMES AT SEA is a delightful spoof of the movie musicals of the 1930s. The engaging cast of six features Bernadette Peters as Ruby, the hoofer who "taps her way to stardom" against all odds.

BIG TIME BUCK WHITE. Dick Williams is more a bore than a bombshell as he delivers a sermon at a Black Power meeting. But the three years that the cast has worked together pays off in some fine comic ensemble playing.

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.

CINEMA

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 Holme--bring to the film a moral force reminiscent of Dostoevsky.

CHITTY CHITTY BANG BANG is a friendly, affectionate musical for all ages--between five and twelve. The first half of the movie drags a bit, but the action picks up once Dick Van Dyke, who plays a pixilated inventor, gets his children, his girl friend (Sally Ann Howes) and his car airborne in a glorious romp.

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! 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 wizardly 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 film 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

SILENCE ON MONTE SOLE, by Jack Olsen. The incident itself was only a footnote to the history of World War II's Italian campaign. Yet Author Olsen (The Black Athlete: A Shameful Story) performs a feat of literary journalism in this meticulously researched, excruciatingly detailed account of Nazi SS reprisal raids on Italian villages that resulted in the murder of 1,800 people, most of whom were women and children.

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. An encyclopedic history of the eccentric family whose arsenal on the Ruhr armed Germany in two world wars.

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 wandering aimlessly through 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 pro 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 his widow, Sonia, and Ian Angus.

O'NEILL: SON AND PLAYWRIGHT, by Louis Sheaffer. In the first of two volumes, Author Sheaffer examines the emotional factors in the playwright's family history that drove him to write his great sprawling tragedies.

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.

THE PUBLIC IMAGE, by Muriel Spark. A wickedly witty novel about a movie star who rises and falls on her public image.

Best Sellers

FICTION

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

2. The Salzburg Connection, MacInnes (2)

3. Preserve and Protect, Drury (4)

4. Airport, Hailey (3)

5. Force 10 from Navarone, MacLean (6)

6. The Hurricane Years, Hawley (7)

7. Testimony of Two Men, Caldwell (9)

8. The First Circle, Solzhenitsyn (10)

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

10. The Senator, Pearson (5)

NONFICTION

1. Instant Replay, Kramer (1)

2. The Day Kennedy Was Shot, Bishop (4)

3. The Money Game, 'Adam Smith' (2)

4. The Arms of Krupp, Manchester (3)

5. On Reflection, Hayes (5)

6. The Rich and the Super-Rich, Lundberg (7)

7. Sixty Years on the Firing Line, Krock (6)

8. The Joys of Yiddish, Rosten (8)

9. Anti-Memoirs, Malraux (10)

10. The American Challenge, Servan-Schreiber

*All times E.S.T.

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