Now that reruns are rerunning, perhaps the most useful show anywhere is one that graces New York's WABC-TV at 6:30 a.m. Saturday and Washington's WETA at 12:30 p.m. Tuesday and Thursday. It is Project Know's "Let's Lipread," and not only is it guaranteed not to awaken the rest of the family or the neighbors, but it is fine preparation for those moments when the Early Bird satellite broadcasts' audio breaks down or for determining what politicians caught by zoom lenses on convention floors are saying to one another. For those not fortunate enough to live on the New York-Washington axis, there are a few other worthy shows on the networks:

Wednesday,May 19

ABC SCOPE (ABC, 10:30-11 p.m.).* "VD: Epidemic," a report on the resurgence of venereal diseases.

Friday, May 21

BOB HOPE PRESENTS THE CHRYSLER THEATER (NBC, 8:30-9:30 p.m.). Maurice Evans plays the chief steward in a Deauville gambling casino, who tries to tutor an American businessman (Cliff Robertson) in the technique of winning at chemin de fer.

FDR (ABC, 9:30-10 p.m.). "The Grand Assault," the Allied push through Italy, the Teheran Conference and Dday.

Saturday, May 22

ABC'S WIDE WORLD OF SPORTS (ABC, 5-6:30 p.m.). A preview of the Clay-Liston fight, the Miami-Nassau powerboat race from Miami and the Rebel 300 stock-car race from Darlington, N.C.

Sunday, May 23

DIRECTIONS '65 (ABC, 12-12:30 p.m.). "The Alchemy of Love," readings of the love poems and letters of Robert and Elizabeth Barrett Browning by Eric Berry and Marion Seldes.

THE INHERITANCE (NBC, 2-3 p.m.). A recreation of Biblical history through filmed explorations of Iran, Iraq, Egypt, Jordan and Israel. Color.

NBC SPORTS IN ACTION (NBC, 6:30-7:30 p.m.). The Monte Carlo sports-car rally. Color.

Monday, May 24

CBS REPORTS (CBS, 10-11 p.m.). "The National Driver's Test," an actual examination that viewers can take in their own living rooms, with the most common collision situations visually reproduced.

Tuesday, May 25

BELL TELEPHONE HOUR (NBC, 10-11 p.m.). Donald O'Connor hosts a program of "The Music of Cole Porter."

THEATER

On Broadway

THE GLASS MENAGERIE. This revival of the 20-year-old Tennessee Williams play is so much the best serious drama on Broadway that it is as if a graveyard of mediocrity had abruptly kicked off all its tombstones. The cast, headed by Maureen Stapleton, lacks the distinction of the play, but the glow of this American classic bathes all that it touches.

HALF A SIXPENCE is a kind of cut-rate, cockney Hello, Dolly! Tommy Steele is an infectiously beamish entertainer, Onna White's dances burst forth like spring blossoms, and the show's style is to woo rather than wow.

THE ODD COUPLE. Two men suffering hangovers from marriages on the rocks try living together and not liking it. The result is exquisite chaos and inebriating hilarity.

LUV. Murray Schisgal takes three fashionably denuded psyches liberally sprinkled with self-indulgence and garnished with pseudo-Freudian jargon, then roasts them in a hot oven of satire.

THE OWL AND THE PUSSYCAT. Flesh is flesh and spirit is spirit, and rarely the twain do meet. A nonintellectual prostitute (Diana Sands) and a musty book clerk (Alan Alda) make the attempt seem screamingly funny. She tries to improve her mind; he loses his.

Off Broadway

JUDITH. Jean Giraudoux has fashioned a parable on heroism and piety from the story of the Jewess who glorified herself and saved her nation by destroying a conqueror. Rosemary Harris' Judith embraces all the facets of a complex woman.

A VIEW FROM THE BRIDGE. This early Arthur Miller play about the family of a Brooklyn longshoreman is infused with elements of Greek tragedy; a splendid cast gives a moving performance.

RECORDS

Opera

WAGNER: PARSIFAL (Philips; 5 LPs). This first stereo version has top credentials: conducted by Hans Knappertsbusch, an eminent Wagnerian, it was recorded at Bayreuth, where Wagner intended his "sacred dramatic festival" to be performed and where the acoustics are ideal--even, unfortunately, for coughs. Knappertsbusch slowly and hypnotically weaves the Bayreuth Festival Orchestra and Chorus into a rich tapestry of sound against which budding Heldentenor Jess Thomas as Parsifal, Baritone George London as King Amfortas and Soprano Irene Dalis as the tortured Kundry eloquently play out the medieval legend of renunciation and redemption.

TOSCA (Angel; 2 LPs). Justly famed as Tosca, which she sang on her recent return to the Metropolitan Opera, Maria Callas today gives performances brimming with passion. But this newly recorded Callas has a nearly unbeatable rival--the Callas of twelve years ago. Since then her voice and even, occasionally, her characterization have hardened, and though the drama may at times be heightened, cerebral firepower is no substitute for vocal beauty. Baritone Tito Gobbi is again a superb Scarpia.

DEBUSSY: PELLEAS ET MELISANDE (London; 3 LPs). Ernest Ansermet, conductor of 1'Orchestre de la Suisse Romande, deftly evokes visions of the Poe-like castle and moon-bright grotto of Debussy's poetic opera. Musically light-textured, the opera is philosophically dark: early death is the destiny of the young lovers, appealingly sung by Dutch Soprano Erna Spoorenberg and French Tenor Camille Maurane.

MONTEVERDI: THE CORONATION OF POPPEA (Angel; 2 LPs). Monteverdi's last opera was the first with psychologically true characters who tell their story in almost continuous melody rather than long declamations. Conducted by John Pritchard for the Glyndebourne Festival, this is a cut-down version, but it includes all the scenes leading up to the triumph of immorality. The able cast includes Tenor Richard Lewis as the love-struck Nero, Soprano Magda Laszlo as Poppea and Soprano Frances Bible as Ottavia.

RENATA TEBALDI (London). The diva serena had not recorded for two years, but these nine Italian arias, only one of which she had recorded before, bring generally good news of a still-shimmering voice. Not all the high reaches are easily secured, but her warmth, womanliness and pleading pianissimos are most touching in some of the other roles, notably that of the mother in Cilea's L'Arlesiana singing Esser madre e un inferno.

CINEMA

NOBODY WAVED GOODBYE. Two troubled teen-agers (Peter Kastner and Julie Biggs) suffer growing pains in Toronto, and Canadian Writer-Director Don Owen studies their plight with such cinematic assurance that the problem play turns into a poem.

IL SUCCESSO. As an ambitious young executive who sheds wife, friends and integrity en route from the bottom of the barrel to the top of the heap, Vittorio Gassman demonstrates, sometimes hilariously, sometimes chillingly, how-to-succeed-Italian-style.

THE ROUNDERS. This amiable western spoof is enlivened by Henry Fonda and Glenn Ford as a team of shiftless bronco-busters trapped in a love-hate relationship with an obstreperous horse.

THE PAWNBROKER. Recalling the terrors of Nazi death camps amid the squalor of Spanish Harlem, Rod Steiger, in the title role, gives one of the year's grimmest movies the extra impact of a powerful performance.

THE OVERCOAT. A shy office clerk (Roland Bykov) trades his rags for the mantle of tragedy in this exquisite Russian version of Gogol's classic.

A BOY TEN FEET TALL. Huck Finn mixes with Hemingway when a runaway British lad (Fergus McClelland) and a grizzled old diamond poacher (Edward G. Robinson) cross paths in brightest Africa.

RED DESERT. Monica Vitti goes soul-searching amid the blighted landscape of industrial Ravenna as a neurotic young wife whose alienation is stunningly visualized in Director Michelangelo Antonioni's first color film.

ZORBA THE GREEK. Anthony Quinn presses strong red wine from Nikos Kazantzakis' novel, with Oscar Winner Lila Kedrova as the pathetic old jade who is drinking her final toast to life.

BOOKS

Best Reading

This spring augurs better for mystery lovers than for followers of serious fiction. Among the most beguiling on the sleuth are The French Doll, by Vincent O'Connor, which has a CIA hero and a racy Paris setting; The Interrogators, by Allan Prior, in which two doughty Scotland Yard men are hampered in their pursuit by their heavy drinking; Midnight Plus One, by Gavin Lyall, a kaleidoscopic Bondian yarn; and Cunning as a Fox, by Kyle Hunt (a pseudonym of John Creasey), in which the sleuth is a psychiatrist hired by the wanted teenager's frantic parents.

The current best among the rest:

LOCKOUT, by Leon Wolff. The bitter story of the Homestead Strike in 1892, in which workers struck against the lethal working conditions at Andrew Carnegie's steel mill. Henry Clay Frick, Carnegie's second-in-command at the time, retaliated with a hired army of Pinkerton men; in four months of hostilities 35 were killed, 400 injured. When the strike was finally broken, men who were not fired went back to worse conditions and slashed pay.

DREISER, by W. A. Swanberg. A crude, naive natural writer, Dreiser was the founder and embodiment of the realistic school of writing that shocked the country in the first decades of this century. His life, like his work, was stubborn, untidy and wayward. Biographer Swanberg (Citizen Hearst) has made the most of it.

THE GIANT DWARFS, by Gisela Eisner. A bitterly effective indictment of the Nazi era and the materialistic society that succeeded it. Through the eyes of a brilliant but deformed child, this young German novelist depicts a family's joyless, all-consuming pursuit of money and respectability at the cost of human feeling.

BACK TO CHINA, by Leslie Fiedler. The hero is a guilt collector who enmeshes himself in the misdeeds of others while fastidiously ignoring his gaping lapses of conscience. A good satire on the portrait-of-the-artist-as-a-dirty-dog school.

THE OXFORD HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN PEOPLE, by Samuel Eliot Morison. The historian-admiral draws heavily on his earlier works to present the sweep of the American story. His perspective on recent history is naturally personal, but the book is solidly readable and laced with many of its author's valuable insights.

I WILL TRY, by Legson Kayira. Determined to get a U.S, education even if he had to walk there, the author, a young African from the Malawi Republic, actually trekked some 800 miles of the way, toward fulfilling his dream.

Best Sellers

FICTION 1. Herzog, Bellow (1 last week)

2. The Ambassador, West (6)

3. Up the Down Staircase, Kaufman (2)

4. Hotel, Hailey (3)

5. Don't Stop the Carnival, Wouk (4)

6. Funeral in Berlin, Deighton (5)

7. The Flight of the Falcon, Du Maurier (9)

8. Hurry Sundown, Gilden (7)

9. The Man, Wallace (8)

10. An American Dream, Mailer (10)

NONFICTION

1. Markings, Hammarskjold (1)

2. Queen Victoria, Longford (2)

3. Journal of a Soul, Pope John XXIII (3)

4. The Founding Father, Whalen (4)

5. My Shadow Ran Fast, Sands (5)

6. The Italians, Barzini (6)

7. The Oxford History of the American People, Morison

8. Sixpence in Her Shoe, McGinley (7)

9. Life with Picasso, Gilot and Lake (8) 10. Design for Survival, Power (10)

* All times E.D.T.

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