Wednesday, February 19 NIXON AND THE BLACKS (NET, 9-10 p.m.). Three black reporters from the New York Times examine the Nixon Ad ministration from the Negro's point of view.

ACADEMY OF PROFESSIONAL SPORTS AWARDS (NBC, 10-11 p.m.). Perry Como hosts the ceremonies that honor the out' standing professional athletes of 1968.

Thursday, February 20 HE'S YOUR DOG, CHARLIE BROWN (CBS, 7:30-8 p.m.). Charlie's clever canine will never go homeless. Repeat.

LOOKING BACK (CBS, 8-9 p.m.). Andy Griffith returns for a special with Guests Janet Leigh, Don Knotts, Ernie Ford, the Young Saints and the Establishment.

NET PLAYHOUSE (NET, 8-9:30 p.m.). "No Skill or Special Knowledge Required" is the second part of the four-part John Hop kins' drama, Talking to a Stranger, which relates the events leading to a suicide through the eyes of the dead woman's fam ily. The daughter gave her view first; this time it is the father's turn.

THURSDAY NIGHT MOVIES (CBS, 9-11 p.m.). James Garner, Julie Andrews and James Coburn star in The Americanization of Emily (1964).

Friday, February 21 FRIDAY NIGHT MOVIES (CBS, 9-11 p.m.).

Seven Brides for Seven Brothers (1954) is a tall order -- even for a big man like How ard Keel.

Saturday, February 22 WIDE WORLD OF SPORTS (ABC, 5-6:30 p.m.). The Olympians Track and Field Meet from Madison Square Garden, plus the announcement of the series' "Athlete of the Year" award.

Sunday, February 23 DISCOVERY '69 (ABC, ll:30-noon). "Operation Weather" uses the evolution of 1968's Hurricane Gladys, which devastated parts of Florida and the Carolinas, as a case history for studying the work of meteorologists.

CHILDREN'S FILM FESTIVAL (CBS, 1:30-2:30 p.m.). A young boy adopts a lost dog and becomes entangled in a web of falsehoods in the Czechoslovakian film, Doggie and Three.

EXPERIMENT IN TELEVISION (NBC, 4:30-5:30 p.m.). An original surrealistic comedy by Jim Henson and Jerry Juhl, "The Cube" deals with the complex problems of reality v. illusion. Dick Schaal plays captive host to various characters who visit him in his doorless and windowless chamber.

THE ED SULLIVAN SHOW (CBS, 8-9 p.m.).

In a special tribute to Broadway Producer Harold Prince, Ed will feature numbers from the hit shows Fiddler on the Roof and Cabaret.

SUNDAY NIGHT MOVIE (ABC, 9-11:45 p.m.). The Chase (1966) stars Marlon Bran do, Jane Fonda and E. G. Marshall.

Tuesday, February 25 TUESDAY NIGHT AT THE MOVIES (NBC, 9-11 p.m.). In The Perils of Pauline (1967), Pamela Austin ("The Dodge Rebellion Wants You" girl) as Pauline is assisted--or assaulted--by Pat Boone, Terry-Thomas and Edward Everett Horton.

CBS PLAYHOUSE (CBS, 9:30-11 p.m.). Ellen Violett's original drama, "The Experiment," is about a brilliant young scientist and his girl who risk their individuality by moving from the academic to the industrial world.

THEATER

On Broadway

CANTERBURY TALES. There is something innocent, sweet and perhaps inaccessible about Geoffrey Chaucer. Unfortunately, the Chaucerian spirit is largely missing from this British musical. The chorus boys' codpieces are ample, but they scarcely camouflage the empty boisterousness of both dance and bawdry.

DEAR WORLD is a musical based on Jean Giraudoux's The Madwoman of Chaillot. Giraudoux's play had a fencing master's play of the intellect and a sense of historical irony. All are missing from this Broadway adaptation. Angela Lansbury as the madwoman manages to save her reputation, if not the play.

CELEBRATION is a musical that dwells in childhood's land of enchantment, with an Orphan and an Angel prevailing over the evil Mr. Rich. The story line could have been as sticky as a candied apple, but Tom Jones and Harvey Schmidt, co-creators of The Fantasticks, have written a fairy tale that winks at itself.

COCK-A-DOODLE DANDY was Sean O'Casey's favorite play, and the APA Repertory Company makes it a rollicking piece of theater. The Cock, magnificently plumed and wattled, is played with impudent elegance by Barry Bostwick. The most uninhibited performance, though, comes from a thatched cottage that writhes, rattles and sheds its vines in one of the most dramatic cases of demonic possession since the Gadarene swine.

HADRIAN VII. Frederick William Rolfe poured out a minor masterpiece of wish fulfillment in his novel Hadrian the Seventh, an account of how a rejected candidate for the priesthood is elected Pope. In Playwright Peter Luke's dramatization, Rolfe becomes the hero of his own story. As the misfit made Pope, Alec McCowen turns in a splendid performance marked by his superb command of technique.

FORTY CARATS. Julie Harris plays a middle-aged lady who is courted by a young man just about half her age, while her teenage daughter runs off with a wealthy widower of 45 in this frothy French farce.

JIMMY SHINE. Dustin Hoffman's bravura performance as a born loser stumbling through episodes from his past, present and fantasies, is the best thing about this work by Playwright Murray Schisgal.

Off Broadway

CEREMONIES IN DARK OLD MEN is a first play by Lonne Elder III about the disintegration of a black family in Harlem. The production confirms an unfortunate habit of Manhattan's Negro Ensemble Company--that of doing somewhat spindly works with skill, verve and beautifully meshed precision.

TANGO. David Margulies plays a young man who tries to rebel against his totally permissive home in this incisive comedy on the vagaries of life in the contemporary value vacuum by Polish Playwright Slawomir Mrozek.

LITTLE MURDERS. Cartoonist Jules Feiffer intended to write the blackest of comedies in his first full-length play, the story of a family living in a psychotic New Yo'-k milieu of impending violence and violated privacy. The laughs are lighthearted and the scene surreal, but Director Alan Arkin and a resourceful cast do maintain an incredibly fast pace and achieve razor-sharp social observation.

TO BE YOUNG, GIFTED AND BLACK. In a moving tribute to Negro Playwright Lorraine Hansberry, an able interracial cast presents sketches from her writings that thread an elegiac mood through the range of comedy, rage and introspection.

DAMES AT SEA, with a thoroughly engaging cast and ingenious staging, is a delightful parody of the Busby Berkeley-type movie musicals of the '30s. Bernadette Peters is aided by an engaging cast.

TEA PARTY and THE BASEMENT are two one-acters by England's accomplished Harold Pinter. In Tea Party Sisson, a manufacturer of bidets, is thrown into a catatonic state at an office tea party by the ambiguous relationships of his family and his secretary. The Basement is about a man and his girl friend who move in to share an old chum's flat.

CINEMA

RED BEARD, the most recent film by the great Japanese director Akira Kurosawa, is a morality play about the spiritual growth of a young doctor. Kurosawa is technically without peer, and such actors as Toshiro Mifune help him to achieve almost overwhelming emotional force.

GRAZIE ZIA. In this first feature, Italian Film Maker Salvatore Samperi, 25, tackles nothing less than the disintegration of contemporary morality. Despite the film's vagueness and repetitiveness, a biting and original satirical eye gleams through the callow symbolism.

THE SHAME. Ingmar Bergman broods once again on the social and spiritual obligations of the artist. Bergman in his 29th film remains one of the cinema's foremost stylists, and his actors--Max von 'Sydow, Gunnar Bjornstrand and Liv Ullman--range effortlessly between fervor and restraint.

THE FIXER. "I am a man who, although not much, is still much more than nothing," proclaims the accidental hero of this drama of social commitment and political responsibility. Under the deft direction of John Frankenheimer, Alan Bates, Dirk Bogarde and Ian Holm often approach perfection in their difficult roles.

THE NIGHT THEY RAIDED MINSKY'S. Good humor, and excellent performances abound in this affectionate tribute to the raunchy days of oldtime burlesque. As a seedy song-and-dance man, Jason Robards wears a frayed straw boater as naturally as John Wayne wears a Stetson.

OLIVER! Dickens' novel might at first seem as likely a subject for a musical as Death of a Salesman, but Lionel Bart's score, Carol Reed's direction and John Box's breathtaking sets all combine to make what is easily the entertainment of the year.

FACES. A handful of middle-aged people complain about what a mess they have made of their various marriages in this meticulously detailed film written and directed by John Cassavetes. Some of the direction and much of the acting are excellent, but Cassavetes never quite manages to stir empathy on the part of the audience, perhaps because his depressing interpretation offers so little relief.

BOOKS

Best Reading

THE 900 DAYS: THE SIEGE OF LENINGRAD, by Harrison E. Salisbury. An extravagantly detailed account of the most murderous siege in modern history. Hitler and Stalin are its villains; its heroes are the people of the city of St. Petersburg, who clung to life and hope despite hideous suffering.

AFTERWORDS: NOVELISTS ON THEIR NOVELS, edited by Thomas McCormack. The writer's job is lonelier than the lighthouse keeper's, but given a chance to talk about their methods and their aims, 14 successful novelists respond here with vigor, humor and perception.

IT HAPPENED IN BOSTON? by Russell H. Greenan. In a bizarre first novel, a deranged narrator, park-bench dreamer, and master painter tells how he became a forger and murderer anxious to kill God.

THE STRANGLERS, by George Bruce. The original "thugs" were Indian marauders who strangled travelers and robbed them. It was not until the 1830s, when their victims were numbered in the tens of thousands, that a crusading British officer finally wiped them out. A horrifying, little-known facet of Empire.

ZAPATA AND THE MEXICAN REVOLUTION, by John Womack Jr. A young (31) Harvard historian tells the great revolutionary's story with skill and compassion.

OBSOLETE COMMUNISM: THE LEFT-WING ALTERNATIVE, by Daniel and Gabriel Cohn-Bendit. Radical leader Cohn-Bendit and his brother analyze last year's student-worker uprising in France, blaming its failure on lack of support from the Communist Party and trade unions.

HIS TOY, HIS DREAM, HIS REST, by John Berryman. Using a fictional middle-aged American named Henry as his mouthpiece, Berryman comments on a whole range of human experience, particularly life during the past eleven years, and completes the poem cycle begun in 77 Dream Songs.

Best Sellers

FICTION 1. The Salzburg Connection, Maclnnes (1 last week)

2. A Small Town in Germany, le Carre (2)

3. Airport, Hailey (3)

4. Preserve and Protect, Drury (5)

5. Force 10 from Navarone, MacLean (4)

6. The First Circle, Solzhenitsyn (6)

7. A World of Profit, Auchincloss (7)

8. The Hurricane Years, Hawley (9)

9. By the Pricking of My Thumbs, Christie 10. Testimony of Two Men, Caldwell

NONFICTION 1. The Money Game, 'Adam Smith' (1)

2. Thirteen Days, Kennedy (4)

3. Instant Replay, Kramer (2)

4. The Valachi Papers, Maas (5)

5. The Arms of Krupp, Manchester (6)

6. The Day Kennedy Was Shot, Bishop (8)

7. The Rich and the Super-Rich, Lundberg (9)

8. Miss Craig's 21-Day Shape-Up Program for Men and Women, Craig (10)

9. The Joys of Yiddish, Rosten (3) 10. The 900 Days, Salisbury

-All times E.S.T.

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