Wednesday, January 19 BATMAN (ABC, 7:30-8 p.m.).* The second week of this new twice-a-week series features Burgess Meredith as the Penguin --a fine-feathered foe of that dynamic duo, Batman and Robin.
CHRYSLER PRESENTS THE BOB HOPE CHRIST MAS SHOW (NBC, 9-10:30 p.m.). Had Bob been born in ancient Rome, he would have followed the eagle through all of Gaul. As it is, it's Viet Nam.
Thursday, January 20
CBS THURSDAY NIGHT MOVIE (CBS 9-11 p.m.). The War Lover, Columbia's 1962 rendering of John Mersey's chilling novel about a World War II B-17 bomber pilot who lives to kill, filmed on location in England and starring Steve McQueen.
THE BARON (ABC, 10-11 p.m.). What ABC calls its "second season" spawns a third new spy--this time a London antique dealer pressed into service by British intelligence. Based on a character created by Mystery Writer John Creasey, the series stars Steve Forrest. Premiere.
Friday, January 21
PETER PAN (NBC, 7:30-9:30 p.m.). Mary Martin, who starred on Broadway in this musical version of the James Barrie classic and did it twice live for TV, put it on video tape in 1960. This is a replay of that tape.
Saturday, January 22
BING CROSBY 1966 GOLF TOURNAMENT (NBC, 4-5 p.m.). The annual pro-amateur event, from Pebble Beach, Calif.
ABC'S WIDE WORLD OF SPORTS (ABC, 5-6:30 p.m.). The International Ski Jumping championships at Innsbruck, Austria, and the International Surfing championships at Makaha Beach, Hawaii.
Sunday, January 23
THE AMERICAN SPORTSMAN (ABC, 4-5 p.m.). A revival, now that the football season is over, of a series about hunting and fishing, featuring this week Craig (Peter Gunn) Stevens hunting Indian tigers in the jungles of Bundi (with the maharajah), and Bandleader Phil Harris shooting pheasant in Nebraska (without Alice Faye).
AGES OF MAN (CBS, 4:30-5:30 p.m.). Part I (with Part II next week) of Sir John Gielgud's one-man Shakespeare program, which strutted its hour upon a Broadway stage seven years ago and now happily can be heard once more.
BING CROSBY GOLF TOURNAMENT (NBC, 4:30-6 p.m.). The final day.
THE TWENTIETH CENTURY (CBS, 6-6:30 p.m.). "The Majestic Polluted Hudson," a camera cruise down the mighty river as it picks up sewage and industrial waste for delivery to New York Harbor, plus interviews with Governor Nelson Rockefeller, Senator Bobby Kennedy and others.
Tuesday, January 25 CBS NEWS SPECIAL (CBS, 10-11 p.m.).
Part II of "The National Health Test," in which viewers are asked some of the questions about health most frequently put to doctors by their patients, then told the correct answers and scored against a nation wide sample.
THEATRE
On Broadway MARAT/SADE shreds the nerves, bruises the ear and hypnotizes the eye. In a display of directorial virtuosity, Peter Brook has expanded Playwright Peter Weiss's metaphor of the world as a madhouse, and the superbly disciplined Royal Shakespeare Company envelops the playgoer in an experience that is largely inspired sensationalism, but quintessentially theatrical.
INADMISSIBLE EVIDENCE. In the dock of self-accusation, a man charges that his life has become an obscenity. John Osborne's anti-hero--a defeated solicitor in his middle years--has lost his way but not his wittily vituperative voice, and Nicol Williamson, 28, brings this grieving, raging character to memorable life in the most powerful male performance Broadway has seen in more than a decade.
CACTUS FLOWER. France's humor, like its wine, travels well, since it is usually about a universal subject, sex. With Abe Burrows at the helm, this farce about a roueish dentist whose idea of honesty is to tell his mistress he's married when he's not, has made a successful crossing. Lauren Bacall and Barry Nelson are on board.
YOU CAN'T TAKE IT WITH YOU. In the Sycamore household, anything can happen--and certainly does. As captured by George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart in 1936, the inspired madness of an everlasting free-spirited Manhattan family seems exquisitely refreshing to today's theatergoers--who may have forgotten that to be effective, humor need not be black.
THE ROYAL HUNT OF THE SUN. A pantomimic interpretation of the Spanish conquistadors ascending the Andes and the gorgeously costumed array of conquered Peruvians make a dazzling wrapping, but cannot hide the dramatic hollowness of Peter Shaffer's historical drama.
RECORDS
Spoken
SHAKESPEARE: MUCH ADO ABOUT NOTHING (3 LPs; RCA Victor). In Shakespeare's funniest social comedy, everything depends on the speed and sparkle of the witty duels between Beatrice and Benedick, played here by two fast-rising British stars, Maggie Smith and Robert Stephens, whose voices are whirling kaleidoscopes. That young theatrical iconoclast, Franco Zeffirelli (creator of a successful beatnik Hamlet), directed this National Theater of Britain production, which one critic called as lurid and animated as a Superman comic. The performance on the recording is robust but never bumptious.
THE STEVENSON WIT (RCA Victor) consists of excerpts from the speeches, press conferences and off-the-cuff remarks of the late ambassador, strung together with remarks by David Brinkley. Though Stevenson's wit was warm and enlightening, he was not a comic, and to isolate his jokes from the eloquent purposes they served does him no great service and gives the listener little sustenance.
T. S. ELIOT: THE FAMILY REUNION (3 LPs; Caedmon). Static and awkward to stage with its philosophic asides and Greek choruses, this poetic play is ideal for recording. One of Eliot's last undertakings was to help choose the excellent cast, which perfectly weaves the shadowy modern drama of sin and expiation. Dame Sybil Thorndike is Amy, the steely dowager who has spent 35 years "designing" her son's life. Paul Scofield plays Harry, the restless, half-mad son who bursts asunder the conventional family gathering, and Flora Robson is Agatha, the all-knowing aunt ("When the loop in time comes," she warns, "the hidden :i revealed, and the spectres show themselves").
JOHN FITZGERALD KENNEDY ... AS WE REMEMBER HIM (2 LPs; Columbia). Woven into a long narration along with fragments from a dozen of his speeches are short, taped reminiscences about Kennedy as a child and as a man, by his mother, his brother Bobby, his teachers, fellow politicians and friends. Upstaging the records, however, is the accompanying, handsomely illustrated book of the same title, published by Atheneum and also available separately.
THE BEST OF MIKE NICHOLS & ELAINE MAY (Mercury), a bit of memorabilia now that the team is split, consists of eight skits ranging from merely humorous to wildly hilarious. The conversation between the telephone operator and an anxious information seeker who has just deposited his last dime is a classic chapter in man's never-ending bout with the machine. Zanier is the jealous love scene between a surgeon and a nurse during an operation; between his commands for gauze and sponges, they argue tensely over her infidelity. Bach to Bach is the musings of two symphonic sophisticates in bed: "I never can believe that Bartok died on Central Park West."
CINEMA
DOCTOR ZHIVAGO. Romance and revolution flourish against eye-filling vistas of Mother Russia in Director David Lean's literate, old-fashioned love story based on Pasternak's novel, with Omar Sharif as Zhivago, Julie Christie as his Lara.
THE SPY WHO CAME IN FROM THE COLD. Director Martin Ritt (Hud) has made John le Carre's novel into a masterly thriller, with Richard Burton giving his best movie performance as the worn-out British intelligence hack on a fateful mission.
VIVA MARIA! An alluring pair of strip queens (Brigitte Bardot, Jeanne Moreau) carry on a Central American revolution rather haphazardly devised by Director Louis Malle (The Lovers), but France's master Cinematographer Henri Decae catches their act and turns a frail farce into a thing of beauty.
THUNDERBALL. In his fourth film outing James Bond (Sean Connery) claims his quota of girls, gadgets and bogus glamour while hunting for stolen atom bombs in the Bahamas.
JULIET OF THE SPIRITS. The inner life of a bourgeois matron (Giulietta Masina) becomes a psychic three-ring circus as Director Federico Fellini (La Dolce Vita, 8 1/2) puts milady's past, present and future through the hoops in flamboyant style.
THE LEATHER BOYS. In this lively but poignant British drama, Rita Tushingham, Colin Campbell and Dudley Sutton flesh out an unholy triangle about a teen-aged slattern who nearly loses her young husband to a homosexual in hood's clothing.
DARLING. Director John Schlesinger views the jet set through a glass brightly, focusing mainly on Julie Christie's shimmering performance as a go-go playgirl who finds scruples a handicap for big-league fun-and-games.
TO DIE IN MADRID. A passionate elegy for the victims of Spain's tragic civil war of 1936-39, pictured in vintage newsreels and charged with poetry by such distinguished narrators as John Gielgud and Irene Worth.
BOOKS
Best Reading
THE PROUD TOWER, by Barbara W. Tuchman. Two years after the appearance of her Guns of August, a bestselling account of World War I, Historian Tuchman uses the same cool wit and warm understanding to examine the political and social undercurrents that shaped the world that went to war in 1914.
A THOUSAND DAYS: JOHN F. KENNEDY IN THE WHITE HOUSE, by Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. Although Historian Schlesinger cannot altogether restrain his boundless admiration for the President he loved and served, this still is by far the best, and most balanced, assessment of the Kennedy years that has yet appeared.
THE EVENING OF THE HOLIDAY, by Shirley Hazzard. Because she writes with delicacy and precision and never succumbs to the obvious, Author Hazzard has produced a haunting and near-perfect first novel about the brief affair in Italy of two not-so-young, not-so-passionate lovers.
THE DAYS OF HENRY THOREAU, by Walter Harding. With this able biography, Thoreau Expert Harding seeks to show that the voice of Concord's consecrated crank, silenced a century ago, speaks more loudly than ever.
THE TEXAS RANGERS, by Walter Prescott Webb. A century of legalized carnage is described with scholarly precision and boyish glee in this definitive history--re-published for the first time since 1935--of a rootin', tootin', shootin', lootin' and generally low-falutin' organization that enforced the law and other unpopular prejudices during the winning of the Southwest.
SELECTED LETTERS OF MALCOLM LOWRY, edited by Harvey Breit and Margerie Bonner Lowry. A tragic novelist shows in his letters the courage and dedication to his craft that enabled him to produce his single masterpiece, Under the Volcano, a modern version of Dante's Inferno.
Best Sellers
FICTION
1. The Source, Michener (1 last week)
2. Those Who Love, Stone (2)
3. Up the Down Staircase, Kaufman (4)
4. The Lockwood Concern, O'Hara (5)
5. Airs Above the Ground, Stewart (3)
6. Hotel, Hailey (6)
7. Thomas, Mydans (7)
8. The Honey Badger, Ruark (8)
9. The Rabbi, Gordon (9)
10. The Man with the Golden Gun, Fleming (10)
NONFICTION
1. A Thousand Days, Schlesinger (1)
2. Kennedy, Sorensen (2)
3. Games People Play, Berne (4)
4. A Gift of Prophecy, Montgomery (5)
5. A Gift of Joy, Hayes (3)
6. Yes I Can, Davis and Boyar (6)
7. World Aflame, Graham (10)
8. In Cold Blood, Capote
9. Intern, Doctor X (9)
10. The Penkovskiy Papers, Penkovskiy (7)
* All times E.S.T.
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