TELEVISION

Wednesday, March 13 HANS CHRISTIAN ANDERSEN (ABC, 8:30-11 p.m.).* Danny Kaye as the old Danish storyteller, assisted by Farley Granger and Ballerina Jeanmaire.

Friday, March 15

THE ACTOR (ABC, 8:30-9:30 p.m.). Sir Alec Guinness heads a cast of British theatrical performers in this ABC News study of the acting profession. Critic Kenneth Tynan wrote the script for the show.

AMERICA'S JUNIOR MISS PAGEANT (NBC, 10-11 p.m.). Fifty "ideal high school girls" vie for the title of 1908's Junior Miss.

Saturday, March 16

ABC'S WIDE WORLD OF SPORTS (ABC, 5-6:30 p.m.). N.C.A.A. Indoor Track and Field championships, from Cobo Arena in Detroit, Mich.

Sunday, March 17

ISSUES AND ANSWERS (ABC, 1:30-2 p.m.). Oregon's Republican Senator Mark Hatfield is the guest.

NATIONAL HOCKEY LEAGUE (CBS, 2-4:30 p.m.). The Toronto Maple Leafs v. the Philadelphia Flyers, in Ph ladelphia.

NBA BASKETBALL (ABC, 2-4 p.m.). New York Knickerbockers v. the San Francisco Warriors, at San Francisco.

NBC EXPERIMENT IN TELEVISION (NBC, 3-4 p.m.). "The New Voices of Watts" examines the hopeful talents taking shape at the Writers Workshop in the Los Angeles slum area that was the scene of bitter racial rioting two years ago.

THE CHILDREN'S FILM FESTIVAL (CBS, 4:30-5:30 p.m.). The Boy and the Blind Bird, produced in Russia, tells of a boy's attempts to restore the sight of his pet pelican.

AMERICAN AIRLINES ASTROJET GOLF CLASSIC (NBC, 4:30-5:30 p.m.). Highlights of a two-day match at La Costa, Calif., in which top professional football and baseball stars (among them: Daryle Lamonica, Mickey Mantle, Johnny Unitas) compete for $30,000 in prize money.

TRAVELS WITH CHARLEY (NBC, 10-11 p.m.). Henry Fonda narrates this re-creation of John Steinbeck's trip through 20 states with his poodle, Charley.

Monday, March 18

THE BILL COSBY SPECIAL (NBC, 8-9 p.m.). For the first time, Cosby stars as just plain Bill, the monologist who spins tales of his funny Philadelphia childhood.

Tuesday, March 19

WHO, WHAT, WHEN, WHERE, WHY WITH HARRY REASONER (CBS, 10-11 p.m.). "The Strange Case of the English Language" studies the way people--some of them quite famous--take liberties with their native tongue.

NET PLAYHOUSE (shown on Fridays). "Ju lius Monk's PLAZA 9" is an hour of one of America's most celebrated topical re views -- with pokes at everything from le grand Charles to LSD.

NET FESTIVAL "Boston Pops III." Arthur Fiedler conducts the Boston Pops Orches tra in a special concert at Tanglewood in Massachusetts, with Saxophonist Stan Getz as guest soloist.

NET JOURNAL (shown on Mondays). "The Beginnings of Life" is a study of the development of a baby from fetus through birth.

THEATER

Broadway PORTRAIT OF A QUEEN is part documentary chronicle, part dear-diary journal and part dusty political imbroglios, but mostly a record of a woman who also happened to be Queen Victoria. Dorothy Tutin wears the role like a tiara, moving from the spoiled child of power to the yielding, sensuous wife to the desolate widow with the fatigue of existence in her voice.

PLAZA SUITE. If hotel walls had ears--and Neil Simon's comic prowess--they might tell tales as mirth-provoking as these three one-act plays. Directed by Mike Nichols, Suite manages to exercise the funny bone while keeping a sympathetic finger on the human pulse.

THE PRICE is another leaf from Arthur Miller's family album, bound with concern for matters of responsibility and irresponsibility. Pat Hingle and Arthur Kennedy play two brothers who, after 16 years, meet in the attic of their former house to thrash out the price to be paid for old possessions and fresh guilts.

JOE EGG. Peter Nichols takes audacious risks in his play about a couple with a spastic child, putting an innately tragic situation through vaudevillian turns. Albert Finney and Zena Walker make the transitions between clowning and enduring with skill and taste.

ROSENCRANTZ AND GUILDENSTERN ARE DEAD. The protagonists of Tom Stoppard's ironic vehicle are the kind of men to whom life is like musical chairs and they, the losers, left without a seat. But they lose with such humor and verve that the spectators, while empathizing, enjoy the game.

THE APA has three offerings thus far this season: Pantagleize, a fantastic farce by the Belgian Michel de Ghelderode; Exit the King, Ionesco's stark philosophical play about death; and The Show Off, George Kelly's domestic drama of 1924. A pleasing dramatic palette.

Off Broadway

YOUR OWN THING adds beat to the Bard as it madly mixes media, and mischievously juxtaposes Elizabethan and modern attitudes for a grooving replay of Twelfth Night.

RECORDS

Instrumental

PROKOFIEV: THE COMPLETE MUSIC FOR SOLO PIANO (Vox; 2 Vols., each 3 LPs). Composer Sergei Prokofiev was an accomplished concert pianist, and he left a large and lively legacy for his instrument. These recordings include such meditation miniatures as the 20 Visions Fugitives and nine sonatas, among them the famous Seventh, completed during the Battle of Stalingrad. One expects in Prokofiev dissonance, humor, percussiveness and strong drive; yet there is also much sheer lyrical beauty. Budapest-born Gyorgy Sandor plays the melodic passages poignantly and is a sure guide through the harshest chordal clashes--sometimes passionate, sometimes witty, always lucid.

SATIE: PIANO MUSIC VOL. 2 (Angel). Back in the days of Dada, Erik Satie wrote music scored for typewriters, airplane propellers, Morse tickers and lottery wheels. A Montmartre cabaret pianist, he was also a serious composer, puncturing the overblown romanticism of his time by turning out short wry works with such titles as Veritable Flabby Preludes (for a Dog), Disagreeable Sketches, and Chapters Turned Every Which Way. His 50-year-old tidbits still sound fresh and impudent, and are enjoying something of a vogue, due partly to their crisp presentation by Aldo Ciccolini.

BEETHOVEN: SONATA NO. 32 IN C MINOR, OP. 111 (Vanguard). Australian Pianist Bruce Hungerford won critical hurrahs in 1965 when he played five Beethoven sonatas in Carnegie Hall, and the reason is now engraved on vinyl. His interpretation of this late (written five years before the master's death) great two-movement sonata is extremely moving--the first furious buildup dissolving into a tender singing adagio that transcends all that went before.

CHOPIN: THE NOCTURNES (RCA Victor; 2 LPs). German Poet Heinrich Heine once wrote about Chopin that his "fame is aristocratic, it is perfumed with the approval of good society, it is as distinguished as his person." The same might be said of Artur Rubinstein, Chopin's fellow Pole. Taking the long-lined melodies of the 19 night pieces, Rubinstein floats them on their shifting chromatic undercurrents in a most elegant and assured manner, never falling into sentimentality.

BRAHMS: PIANO TRIOS (Philips World Series; 2 LPs). Severely self-critical, Brahms may have destroyed three times the number of compositions he saved. He left only three published works for violin, cello and piano. A fourth, which the Beaux Arts Trio has recorded for the first time, is attributed to the youthful Brahms by a scholar who found the unsigned manuscript in 1924. The well-known B Major is still the strongest of the trios, and its adagio is beautifully sung by the deep bronze-voiced cello of Bernard Greenhouse, the American-born member of the international Beaux Arts Trio, whose voices blend smoothly together and also echo each other lightly and precisely.

CINEMA

THE TWO OF US. Writer-Director Claude Berri has made a funny and charming film about, of all things, antiSemitism; he owes his success largely to two outstanding character actors, Michel Simon, 73, and Alain Cohen, 9.

POOR COW. Carol White plays slob and sexpot, worried mum and girl in love, in this saga of scruffy life in a London slum, a first film by 30-year-old TV Director Kenneth Loach.

PLANET OF THE APES. This screen version of Pierre Boulle's abrasive science-fiction fantasy has replaced Swiftian satire with self-parody; even so, $1,000,000 worth of ape makeup and costumes covers a lot of blemishes.

THE PRODUCERS Wild, ad-lib energy that explodes in a series of sight gags and punch lines makes this saga of two sleazy stage producers (Zero Mostel and Gene

Wilder) uproariously funny for at least half its 88-min. running time, after which Mel Brooks the writer fails Mel Brooks the director by slipping into something sentimental.

BOOKS

Best Reading

COCKSURE, by Mordecai Richler. Satirist Richler's basic weapon is seductio ad absurdum in this stylish spoof of the communications industry and pop culture.

THE GHOST IN THE MACHINE, by Arthur Koestler. The novelist, journalist and philosopher constructs a brilliant brief against the scientific establishment, asserting that man is more than the sum of natural forces.

THE HOLOCAUST, by Nora Levin, and WHILE SIX MILLION DIED, by Arthur D. Morse. More grim evidence that the Allies wrote off the Jews as war casualties after having failed to face their plight in the thirties. The U.S. Congress, F.D.R., and especially the State Department come in for some scalding rebukes.

VANITY OF DULUOZ, by Jack Kerouac. Still another in the seemingly endless run of the ex-beat prophet's autobiographical novels. Few writers have asked their mem ory to speak more often, and the wonder is that Kerouac's replies are still fresh.

DEATH IN LIFE: SURVIVORS OF HIROSHI MA, by Robert Jay Lifton. A Yale research psychiatrist's study of 75 hibaku-sha--survivors of Hiroshima, the greatest unnatural disaster in history. He finds them contaminated by the psychic radiation of guilt, simply because they lived on after their city was annihilated.

THE NAKED APE, by Desmond Morris. An engaging, whimsical book of pop science about the sexiest primate of them all, man.

THE CODEBREAKERS, by David Kahn. A fascinating history and close examination of the science of cryptology and its influence.

THE CONFESSIONS OF NAT TURNER, by William Styron. A shattering fictionalization of the futile 1831 Negro slave revolt in Virginia, based on the confession of the man who led it.

Best Sellers

FICTION

1. Vanished, Knebel (1 last week)

2. The Confessions of Nat Turner, Styron (3)

3. Topaz, Uris (2)

4. Myra Breckinridge, Vidal (5)

5. Christy, Marshall (4)

6. The Tower of Babel, West

7. The Exhibitionist, Sutton (8)

8. Where Eagles Dare, MacLean (7)

9. The President's Plane Is Missing, Serling (10)

10. Rosemary's Baby, Levin

NONFICTION

1. The Naked Ape, Morris (1)

2. Between Parent and Child, Ginott (4)

3. Nicholas and Alexandra, Massie (2)

4. Our Crowd, Birmingham (3)

5. Tolstoy, Troyat (5)

6. The Way Things Work:

An Illustrated Encyclopedia of Technology (6)

7. Thomas Wolfe, Turnbull (10)

8. The Economics of Crisis, Janeway (8)

9. Rickenbacker, Rickenbacker (7)

10. The New Industrial State,

Galbraith

*All times E.S.T.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.