Top of the Week

P: For 18 years on radio, the Bell Telephone Hour was a musical showpiece. Last week it plunged into TV, with superb results. As distinctively package-produced by Henry Jaffe (The Chevy Show, Shirley Temple Storybook), Bell's Adventures in Music, first of four NBC shows this season, tastefully allowed top artists to perform without interruption, even dispensed with an M.C. The cast: Actor Maurice Evans narrating for the uncanny Baird puppets (TIME, Dec. 29), Opera Star Renata Tebaldi (two exciting arias from Madame Butterfly), the piano team of Gold and Fizdale and members of the New York City Ballet. Warmest, most memorable part of the show: Singer Harry Belafonte's spellbinding finale. In a full-throated 18 minutes of folk songs, Belafonte proved once again that he is exactly as advertised: the most compelling balladeer of his day.

P: Few things can be as dull as satires on Hollywood except possibly satires on psychiatrists, but NBC's Omnibus this week combined both in a show that, in its half dozen best moments, reached comically irrational heights rare on TV. The hour-long (and far too slow-paced) show: Malice in Wonderland, by lampooning, lapidating S. J. Perelman, veteran of movie-writing stints (Around the World in 80 Days). Most of Malice enmeshed Dr. Randolph Kalbfus (Keenan Wynn) an innocent Manhattan psychoanalyst who goes to Hollywood as technical adviser on psychological movies. The doctor (crying, "I'm sorry, Sigmund!") is quickly seduced by Star Audrey Merridew (Julie Newmar), a wine-piney Georgia cracker who lives (on hush-puppies) with her cussing, Grant Wooden mother on Aorta Road. In time, Dr. Kalbfus divorces his wife, traipses around in a beret, becomes convinced that Sophia Loren wants to marry him. He winds up back in Manhattan, being analyzed himself. Mourns his analyst: "It's no good. We'll never understand what happens to people in Hollywood." Sighs Dr. Kalbfus: "We've got to keep on trying."

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