Summertime, when the viewin is sleepy, is almost over in television land; jim two more weeks before the first of the tall season premieres. In the meantime:

Thursday, August 25

AMERICAN WHITE PAPER-ORGANIZED CRIME IN THE UNITED STATES (NBC, 7:30-11 p.m.).* Frank McGee will conduct the underworld tour, taking a look at the Prohibition raids of the '20s and continuing on through Murder Inc. of the '40s to the present day. Spliced in among the film clips in this 3 1/2 -hour marathon will be interviews with local, state and federal officials and legislators, most notably Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach and Senators John McClellan, Edward Long and Robert Kennedy.

THE AVENGERS (ABC. 10-11 p.m) "The Man-Eater of Surrey Green" turns out to be a not so Jolly Green Giant with a brain that responds to special signals from the evil ones. It is up to John Steed and Mrs. Emma Peel to short-circuit the operation.

Friday. August 26

SUMMER FUN (ABC. 8-8:30 p.m.). Keenan Wynn captains an incredible ship of fools awash on the Caribbean during the early 1800s in "The Pirates of Flounder Bay."

NATIONAL LEAGUE FOOTBALL (CBS, 9:30 p.m. to conclusion In the third of four National Football League tune-ups, the Baltimore Colts meet the Cleveland Browns, last year's Eastern Division champs, at Cleveland's Municipal Stadium.

Sunday, August 28

CBS SPORTS SPECTACULAR (CBS, 2:30-4 p.m.). Frank Gifford and Marathon Swimmer Marty Sinn are the commentators on this repeat of the Hall of Fame Swimming and Diving championships at Fort Lauderdale, Fla. Also on the schedule are highlights of the Cleveland Browns' 1965 N.F.L. season.

AMER.CAN FOOTBALL LEAGUE PRESEASON GAME (NBC, 4:30-7:30 p.m.). The Oakland Raiders meet the Denver Broncos in an exhibition game at Bears Stadium, Denver.

Tuesday, August 30

CBS NEWS SPECIAL (CBS, 10-11 p.m.). The winner of a 1965 Peabody Award for television's most inventive art documentary. "The Mystery of Stonehenge," presents a new theory about the original function of the ancient ruins at Stone henge and the controversy this theory has caused within the scientific community. Repeat.

THEATER

On Broadway

MAME. The tone is brassy, the mood is brash, and the genre is pure Broadway. As the latest reincarnation of Patrick Dennis' exuberant Auntie, Angela Lansbury lacks none of the sparkle of a star.

PHILADELPHIA, HERE I COME! The American immigrant experience is a tale oft told; but in this engaging drama, Irish Playwright Brian Friel offers a fascinating visit to the Ould Sod for a glimpse of the wrenching departure that precedes each expectant arrival.

SWEET CHARITY. As Toulouse-Lautrec memorialized the cancan girls of Pans, Director Bob Fosse celebrates the taxi dancers of New York with stylish staging and sophisticated choreography. Owen Verdon is a terpsichorean tornado as a gal who has a lot of love to give--if she could only find a taker.

CACTUS FLOWER. The French need sex farces as children need fairy tales. In this telling, a dour duckling (Lauren Bacall) becomes an appealing swan just in time to tame the big wolf (Barry Nelson).

Off Broadway

HOGAN'S GOAT. The poetry is purplish, the melodrama mauve, but William Alfred paints a colorful canvas of the deeds and misdeeds of Irish politicians in Brooklyn at the turn of the century.

THE MAD SHOW offers some diverting bits of comedy and occasional moments of humor, but in general its mood is too mild to live up to the title.

RECORDS

Virtuosos

CARL WEINRICH: MOZART SONATAS FOR ORGAN AND ORCHESTRA (RCA Victor). Mozart served a short stint as official organist for the Archbishop of Salzburg. His 17 organ sonatas, though intended as insertions in the Mass, are less religious works than graceful incidental music. Organist Weinrich understands this, and gives a luminous, flexible performance.

IGOR KIPNIS: ITALIAN BAROQUE MUSIC FOR HARPSICHORD (Epic). The son of the great Russian bass, Alexander Kipnis, Igor Kipnis is a passionate champion of the harpsichord: he adds to flawless technique a virile attack and a vital conviction that the literature of an obsolete instrument can still be exciting music. Here he plays oddments by Frescobaldi, Galuppi, Pasquini, Rossi and Cimarosa--who wrote when the harpsichord was the highest ornament of Renaissance sensibility. Most elegant of all is Scarlatti's Toccata in D Minor, the last movement of which consists of 29 florid variations on an old Italian theme, tossed aloft by Kipnis like fireworks into the night sky.

BERNARD KRAINIS: CONCERTOS FOR RECORDERS (Mercury). The ancient instrument, beloved by Shakespeare and Pepys, now serves to introduce untold thousands of children and adults to the joys of producing music; so it is all the more dazzling to hear Krainis' virtuoso display as he whistles through concertos by Vivaldi, Telemann and Handel without a tripped note or an empty breath sucked in--like a lark with the lungs of a lion.

JOSEPH SZIGETI (Mercury). The 74-year-old violinist plays mostly sonatas by four modern masters: Debussy, Ives, Honegger and Webern. The Debussy Sonata in C Minor is competent interpretation, but Szigeti really excels in tenser linear works --the eclectic Ives in his only violin sonata and the neo-Baroque Honegger (Sonata No. 7), with its complex, difficult ornamentation, sound fresh and clear. The record's highlight is four pieces (Opus 7) by Anton Webern, none longer than 72 seconds, in which the stripped-down starkness of modern music and its intolerance of repetition or romance are emphasized by Szigeti's signature: a hard, almost rasping tone that is as uncompromising as the music itself.

OSCAR GHIGLIA: GUITAR MUSIC OF FOUR CENTURIES (Angel). An anointed disciple of Andres Segovia ("Most meritorious a young Master"), the 28-year-old Italian guitarist goes from Frescobaldi and Dowland up to Villa-Lobos with brief musical sketches that contrast as widely in mood as in century. His forte seems to be the modern works by the Mexican Manuel Ponce and Villa-Lobos, in which he gives an almost exolosive account.

BYRON JAN IS: RACHMANINOFF'S CONCERTO NO. 2 and TCHAIKOVSKY'S CONCERTO NO. 1 (Mercury). With a matinee idol's face and a technique that suggests a man breathing on filaments of silk rather than pounding a piano, Janis stands up to his Billboard ratings with these favorites. His gift for phrasing is remarkable and very much his own, and Antal Dorati and the Minneapolis Symphony Orchestra balance his sweetness with spirited orchestral reading.

CINEMA

THE WRONG BOX. Directed by Bryan Forbes (King Rat), this black but buoyant British comedy features Michael Caine, Nanette Newman, Ralph Richardson, John Mills and Peter Sellers as a group of improper Victorians scrambling after love or money in the gaslight era.

KHARTOUM. Charlton Heston pulls on still another heroic hat as British General Charles ("Chinese") Gordon, with Laurence Olivier as the Moslem, Mahdi, in a Cinerama version of the bitter 317-day siege of Khartoum.

HOW TO STEAL A MILLION. A clever museum heist is pulled off with slick, professional comedy by Audrey Hepburn and her second-story pal, Peter O'Toole.

WHO'S AFRAID OF VIRGINIA WOOLF? The games people play on Faculty Row make for ferocious fun in a movie as powerful as Edward Albee's Broadway hit, with Richard Burton as a history prof, Elizabeth Taylor as his untamed shrew.

THE ENDLESS SUMMER. A dazzling ode to sun, sand and surf, starring two young Californians as they travel the globe in search of paradise: the perfect beach with the perfect wave.

THE NAKED PREY. In a single-minded epic of survival, native warriors track Director-Star Cornel Wilde through scenic Africa of a century ago.

LE BONHEUR. Gentle yet profoundly cynical, this film by French Director Agnes Varda shows that the happiness of man is not necessarily that of woman.

"THE RUSSIANS ARE COMING THE RUSSIANS ARE COMING." A bumbling Soviet submarine crew panics a tight little island off the New England coast, but the invasion scare is funniest when Broadway's Alan Arkin filters cold war jitters through the psyche of a reticent Russian sailor.

BOOKS

Best Reading

GILES GOAT-BOY, by John Barth. An infinitely involved and dazzling fantasy cum parable about goatish (or maybe human) goings-on at an institution of lower learning that represents the modern U.S.

THE LAST JEW IN AMERICA, by Leslie Fiedler. In three comic novellas, a puckish critic-novelist plays conjuring treks with cards of racial identity. Fiedler's comedy is directed toward painful points of friction in U.S. life. He only laughs when it hurts.

A MAN OF THE PEOPLE, by Chinua Achebe. Nigeria has produced a fine wit capable of taking the blundering chaos of a yet uncreated nation and making it the topical stage for a heartbreaking comedy.

THE RIGHT TO BEAR ARMS, by Carl Bakal. Like many polemics, this angry book is flawed by errors and exaggerations, but it offers unnerving evidence that U.S. gun laws are in an ineffective muddle and that sterner controls are needed to keep firearms out of irresponsible hands.

LOVE'S BODY, by Norman O. Brown. Further Freudian ruminations, by the author of Life Against Death, on the theme of sexual repression as the greatest enemy of human happiness and freedom.

JAMES BOSWELL: THE EARLIER YEARS, by Frederick A. Pottle. A warm and witty portrait that reveals Johnson's Boswell was less a fool than he is sometimes thought to be, though perhaps more a fool than he ought to have been.

A VOICE THROUGH A CLOUD, by Denton Welch. A man who learned to love life only when he had to leave it, Welch recounted with brilliance the motor accident that crippled him and the convalescence that ended with his death at 33.

Of a dozen noteworthy first novels published this summer, four are especially distinguished. Robert Crichton's The Secret of Santa Vittoria, one of the funniest war novels since Mister Roberts, describes the ordeal of an Italian village that during World War II attempted to hide 1,320,000 bottles of vermouth from the German army. Beggars on Horseback, by James Mossman, is a grisly, giggly satire about a mythical Middle Eastern kingdom where the British muddle through until they fizzle out. Trust, by Cynthia Ozick, is a massive (568 pages) and almost continuously impressive attempt to reconstruct the near-religious experience of Marxism cum Utopianism that gripped American Jewry in the '30s. Moss on the North Side, by Sylvia Wilkinson, is a poetic apperception of childhood elaborated by one of the most gifted women writers to emerge in the South since Carson McCullers.

Best Sellers

FICTION

1. Valley of the Dolls, Susann (1 last week)

2. The Adventurers, Robbins (2)

3. Tai-Pan, Clavell (3)

4. The Detective, Thorp (5)

5. The Source, Michener (4)

6. Tell No Man, St. Johns (7)

7. The Kremlin Letter, Behn

8. Those Who Love, Stone (9)

9. I, the King, Keyes (8)

10. The Double Image, Maclnnes (6)

NONFICTION

1. How to Avoid Probate, Dacey (1)

2. Papa Hemingway, Hotchner (4)

3. Human Sexual Response, Masters and Johnson (3)

4. The Last Battle, Ryan (2)

5. Games People Play, Berne (6)

6. In Cold Blood, Capote (5)

7. The Crusades, Oldenbourg (8)

8. The Big Spenders, Beebe (7)

9. Two Under the Indian Sun, Godden and Godden (9)

10. Flying Saucers--Serious Business, Edwards

* All times E.D.T.

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