TELEVISION

This is what they call in the trade a "black week," one of four each year (others: Dec. 18-24, April 17-23, June 19-25) when the viewing public is busy elsewhere, when the Nielsen people don't bother with audience ratings, and when the competing networks hold back most of their big shows. Witness:

Wednesday, August 23 WEDNESDAY NIGHT MOVIE (ABC, 8-11 p.m.).* Stewart Granger, Pier Angeli, Anouk Aimee and Stanley Baker in the 1963 Bible thumper, Sodom and Gomorrah. Repeat.

BOB HOPE PRESENTS THE CHRYSLER THEATER (NBC, 9-10 p.m.). A tarnished film queen, Shelley Winters, flips over a couple of surfers who plan to hang ten over her $3,000,000 jewel collection in "Wipe-out." Repeat.

MIDDLE EAST PERSPECTIVE: "CAN PEACE BREAK OUT?" (CBS, 10-11 p.m.). Interviews with Israeli Premier Levi Eshkol and top Arab leaders. Mike Wallace is the anchor man, backed up by Winston Burdett in Israel, Richard C. Hottelet from the U.N., and Marvin Kalb, Bob Evans and Bill McLaughlin in Jordan.

Thursday, August 24

CBS THURSDAY NIGHT MOVIES (CBS, 9-11 p.m.). Kings Go Forth (1958), adapted from a novel by TIME'S Joe David Brown, an interracial love story played against the background of World War II in southern France, starring Frank Sinatra, Tony Curtis and Natalie Wood. Repeat.

Saturday, August 26

SATURDAY NIGHT AT THE MOVIES (NBC, 9-11 p.m.). Sophia Loren, as a gangster's widow, and Anthony Quinn, her lover, seek to establish a lasting relationship despite the protests of her rebellious teen-age son in The Black Orchid (1959). Repeat.

Sunday, August 27

DISCOVERY '67 (ABC, ll:30-noon). "Discovery Visits New York," Part 1, to explore Manhattan's Lower East Side, Washington Square, Chinatown, the Central Park Zoo and Yorkville through the eyes of the city's children.

THE 215T CENTURY (CBS, 6-6:30 p.m.). "Standing Room Only." How science will help feed, clothe, shelter and otherwise make life bearable for a world population of 7.5 billion by the year 2000. Repeat.

Monday, August 28

NATIONAL FOOTBALL LEAGUE (CBS, 9:30 p.m. to conclusion). The Green Bay Packers v. the Dallas Cowboys at Dallas in the third of five N.F.L. exhibitions.

THEATER

This summer's news hasn't done much to set the scene for laughter, but theaters across the country are trying to keep 'em chuckling.

COOPERSTOWN, N.Y., Playhouse. Luv, by Murray Schisgal, talks Freud and carries a slapstick, Sept. 26-Oct. 8.

FISHKILL, N.Y., Cecilwood Theater. In Generation, a Midwest adman comes to visit the Greenwich Village pad of his newly married daughter and finds her "that way" and her hippie husband planning to deliver the baby, Aug. 29-Sept. 3.

OGUNQUIT BY THE SEA, ME., Playhouse. The Odd Couple. A pair of just-divorced males try to batch it together--and the experience sends them running back to where the girls are. Aug. 28-Sept. 2.

SKOWHEGAN, ME., Lakewood Theater. The Owl and the Pussycat. A feline prostitute claws and purrs her way into the life of a stuffy book clerk with surprising results. Aug. 28-Sept. 2.

HAMPTON, N.H., Playhouse. Luv, Aug. 21-26; The Owl and the Pussycat, Aug. 28-Sept. 2.

DORSET, VT., Playhouse. Any Wednesday. An executive sweetie is kept in a suite as a tax and marriage dodge until the executive wife pays a not very social call. Aug. 31-Sept. 3.

MATUNUCK, R.I., Theater-by-the-Sea. Barefoot in the Park. If wedding albums included the days after the honeymoon, there would be pictures of the ridiculous rather than the sublime. In this Neil Simon play, the period of adjustment for a love-and-poetry wife and her meat-and-potatoes husband sparks the humor. Aug. 28-Sept. 2.

FITCH BURG, MASS., Lake Whalom Playhouse. Tom Ewell plays the put-upon psychiatrist who understands everyone but his own teen-age terribles going through The Impossible Years, Aug. 21-27.

WOODSTOCK, VT., Little Theater. Neil Simon's Come Blow Your Horn, a tale of two brothers, reaps a harvest of hilarity, Aug. 22-26.

JENNERSTOWN, PA., Mountain Playhouse. Never Too Late is a one-gag show that takes off when a middle-aged wife tells her very middle-aged husband that they are to have another child. Papa-to-be protests: "When he gets out of college, I'll be going on 83--if he's smart." Sept. 4-9.

ALEXANDRIA, MINN., Theater L'Homme Dieu. Moliere's classic spoof of the medical profession, The Imaginary Invalid, tells of a hypochondriac hypocrite who discovers that the only way to save on bills is to become a doctor himself. Aug. 23-27.

CINEMA

UP THE DOWN STAIRCASE. Bel Kaufman's novel about a high school teacher in a Manhattan slum has been turned into an entertainment of high spirits, its sheen unscratched by the book's real point.

THE BIRDS, THE BEES AND THE ITALIANS. Director Pietro Germi (Divorce--Italian Style) conducts a boisterous travelogue through the bedrooms of a small Italian city, and finds Virna Lisi in one of them.

IN THE HEAT OF THE NIGHT. In Mississippi, two policemen, one a Negro (Sidney Poitier), the other a white man (Rod Steiger), join forces to solve a murder in this subtle and meticulous study that breaks with the black-white stereotype.

THE WHISPERERS. Dame Edith Evans gives a soaring portrayal of a lonely old lady whose companions are the unheard voices that speak to her cobwebbed mind.

DIVORCE AMERICAN STYLE. A slick, cynical film that nevertheless has the courage to show Dick Van Dyke and Debbie Reynolds as less than sympathetic.

THE FAMILY WAY. A young couple (Hayley Mills, Hywel Bennett) who cannot consummate their marriage are the subjects of this comedy that owes a lot of its depth to an extraordinary performance by John Mills as the groom's father.

EL DORADO. John Wayne and Robert Mitchum get the most out of a script full of raucous frontier humor in this fist-come, fist-served western.

BOOKS

NICHOLAS AND ALEXANDRA, by Robert K. Massie. With impassive clarity, Freelance Journalist Massie details the tragedy of the last of the Romanovs, Czar Nicholas II and his wife, two innocents in a disintegrating toy world.

BEARDSLEY, by Stanley Weintraub. Aubrey Beardsley's life was dedicated to decadence, but this evocative new biography--plus the current Beardsley revival --is evidence that he failed.

RIVERS OF BLOOD, YEARS OF DARKNESS, by Robert Conot. A skillful autopsy of the 1965 Watts riot in Los Angeles performed by a Los Angeles newspaperman.

INCREDIBLE VICTORY, by Walter Lord. A replay of the 1942 Battle of Midway by a specialist in the literary art of summoning up remembrance of things past.

END OF THE GAME, by Julio Cortazar. This Argentine author thinks only the unthinkable and imagines the weird and baffling. These 15 stories, one of which was made into the movie Blow-Up, alternately amaze and appall the reader.

THE DEVIL DRIVES: A LIFE OF SIR RICHARD BURTON, by Fawn Brodie. A painstaking yet entertaining biography of the Victorian explorer and sexologist, Sir Richard Burton, a very flamboyant fellow and a hard chap to map.

NABOKOV: HIS LIFE IN ART, by Andrew Field. Though his performance as critic is generally excellent, Field contributes mainly an engrossing review of Nabokov's entire career--in Russian and English--and traces the roots of such masterpieces as Lolita and Pale Fire.

THE TIME OF FRIENDSHIP, by Paul Bowles. Tales of misanthropy, by a master etcher of the human spirit's dark side.

Best Sellers

FICTION

1. The Arrangement, Kazan (1 last week)

2. The Eighth Day, Wilder (2)

3. The Plot, Wallace (4)

4. The Chosen, Potok (3)

5. Washington, D.C., Vidal (5)

6. Rosemary's Baby, Levin (6)

7. The King of the Castle, Holt (7)

8. A Night of Watching, Arnold (8)

9. Night Falls on the City, Gainham

10. The Secret of Santa Vittoria, Crichton

NONFICTION

1. The New Industrial State, Galbraith (1)

2. A Modern Priest Looks at His Outdated Church, Kavanaugh (2)

3. Our Crowd, Birmingham (3)

4. At Ease: Stories I Tell to Friends, Eisenhower (5)

5. Anyone Can Make a Million, Shulman (7)

6. The Autobiography of Bertrand Russell (4)

7. Everything But Money, Levenson (6)

8. The Death of a President, Manchester (9)

9. Games People Play, Berne (8)

10. Edgar Cayce: The Sleeping Prophet, Stearn (10)

* All times E.D.T.

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