Wednesday, October 14

ELECTION EVE IN BRITAIN (CBS, 7:30-8 p.m.).* Summary of the British election campaign.

OLYMPICS 1964 (NBC, 11:15-11:30 p.m.). Beginning of Olympic track events and the final of men's freestyle 400-meter relay in swimming.

Friday, October 16

BOB HOPE COMEDY SPECIAL (NBC, 8:30-9:30 p.m.). Bob plays a bungling marriage broker who persuades three rowdy cowboys, Aldo Ray, Rod Cameron and Sonny Tufts, to order up three Eastern brides, Rhonda Fleming, Jill St. John and Marilyn Maxwell. Color.

12 O'CLOCK HIGH (ABC, 9:30-10:30 p.m.). Peter Fonda appears as a promising young lieutenant who goes AWOL after meeting a blonde (Jill Haworth) on a three-day leave.

Saturday, October 17

EXPLORING (NBC, 12 noon-1 p.m.). This children's series delves into the mysteries of migration not only of birds and animals but also of people to the New World.

WIDE WORLD OF SPORTS (ABC, 5-6:30 p.m.). The Pendleton Roundup Rodeo from Pendleton, Ore., lassoes together top cowboy contenders in this year's rodeo competition.

Sunday, October 18

DISCOVERY (ABC, 11:30-12 noon). A look at the space equipment under construction for the first moon landings, with photographs of the moon showing that it is far more complex than green cheese.

HALLMARK HALL OF FAME (NBC, 10-11 p.m.). An adaptation of the off-Broadway musical hit The Fantasticks. Ricardo Montalban plays the Spanish bandit who narrates the fanciful love story of two young people whose respective fathers (Bert Lahr and Stanley Holloway) devise zany schemes to bring them together by keeping them apart. Color.

Tuesday, October 20

WORLD WAR I (CBS, 8-8:30 p.m.). U-boat warfare up to and including the torpedoing of the Lusitania (May 1915).

THE DOCTORS AND THE NURSES (CBS, 10-11 p.m.). Merrie Spaeth, one of the scene-stealing youngsters in The World of Henry Orient, makes her television debut as a hospitalized high-school girl who is unaware that she has leukemia.

THEATER

The new season is setting Broadway marquees ablaze again, though the hold over shows still predominate. Of the long-runs, How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying is still incontestably the best of the musicals, and The Subject Was Roses the best of the straight dramatic plays. The top comedy distance runners are Barefoot in the Park and, if there is anyone left who hasn't seen it, Mary, Mary.

The season just started provides three fine, fresh and funny items:

O WHAT A LOVELY WAR. Mockingly ironic, tender, frolicsome and tragic, this musical revolves around the unlikely subject of the follies of World War I. Blending English music-hall sentimentality with Brechtian savagery, Lovely War is an unsettling and not-to-be-forgotten theatrical experience.

FIDDLER ON THE ROOF strays far from Broadway to record the gentle joys and occasional sorrows of a Jewish community in a Russian town in 1905. In his finest performance to date, Zero Mostel gives this musical an unfaltering heartbeat.

ABSENCE OF A CELLO erupts with steady laughter as an academic scientist tangles with an org man from corporation land.

RECORDS

Chamber Music

BRITTEN: STRING QUARTET NO. 2 (London). Written to commemorate the 250th anniversary of the death of Purcell, this quartet is an architectural tour de force, requiring four lone instruments to construct a stately musical monument. Britain's impressive Amadeus Quartet does the job with distinction.

MOZART: CLARINET QUINTET (London). Serenity and a sense of finality characterize the music Mozart wrote two years before his death. In this harmonious performance, strings and clarinet melt magically together as they trade melodies and take turns outlining the airy ornaments. Members of the Vienna Octet are the players, with Alfred Boskovsky the superb clarinetist.

GIAN FRANCESCO MALIPIERO: RISPETTI E STRAMBOTTI FOR STRING QUARTET (Nonesuch). The highly melodious, archaic music of the 82-year-old Italian composer too seldom gets a hearing. Abandoning formal movements, he has strung together 20 "stanzas" in celebration of old Italian poetry. He also celebrates the sound of strings, even reveling in what seem like tuning-up exercises. There is a contagious spontaneity in this reissue by the Stuyvesant Quartet, who on the other side play Hindemith's youthful and exuberant String Quartet No. 2.

HAYDN: QUARTETS OPUS 3, NO. 5; OPUS 33, NO. 2; OPUS 76, NO. 2 (London). A sampling from three periods of Haydn's music, mileposts in the early history of the string quartet. The earliest, nicknamed "The Serenade," sounds like party music played by strolling strings. "The Joke" is more serious; its nickname comes from Haydn's wager that the ladies would talk before the music ended. The last of the three shows Haydn at his richest and most complex. The members of the Janacek Quartet from Czechoslovakia play the works from memory, but they play as one.

PASTORALES (Columbia). Rustic airs of high spirits and low specific gravity that display the virtuosity of the Philadelphia Woodwind Quintet. Mostly 20th century works, the eight pieces include a folksy fresh Walking Tune by Percy Grainger, a catchy early song by Stravinsky, and some skimmering sketches by Darius Milhaud.

WILLIAM WALTON: FAc,ADE (Decca). At the 1923 London premiere of Fac,ade, Edith Sitwell read her poems, with their witty musical accompaniment by her young friend Walton, into the mouth of a mask painted on the curtain hiding her from view. Public and critics alike pronounced the evening an outrage. But the musical "entertainment" has been revived again and again, currently in this recording by Actress Hermione Gingold and Countertenor Russell Oberlin, with Thomas Dunn conducting the small chamber ensemble. Unfortunately for them, Dame Edith herself, with Peter Pears, has performed the work for London Records. Where Gingold dramatizes the poems, Sitwell chants her surrealistic lines like a hypnotist, sometimes at breakneck speed. "We sought to reach a country between music and poetry, like the border between waking and dreaming." Sir Osbert Sitwell has explained. Gingold and Oberlin are too wide-awake.

CINEMA

THE LUCK OF GINGER COFFEY. All the horror, humor and humanity of Brian Moore's novel are captured in this fine, sensitive film about a big Irish bruiser whose wife alone knows that he is really just a middle-aged child. Played to perfection by Robert Shaw and Mary Ure.

TOPKAPI. Director Jules Dassin (Rififi) lightens larceny with laughter as Melina Mercouri and Peter Ustinov head a crook's tour of exotic Istanbul in pursuit of four fabulous emeralds.

THE APE WOMAN. A girl who looks simian becomes a meal ticket for the con man who exploits her misfortune in this ferociously funny Italian comedy about the beastliness of Homo sapiens.

MARY POPPINS. Julie Andrews proves she is a girl to conjure with in Walt Disney's droll musical fantasy about a London nanny who slides up banisters and performs all sorts of diverting miracles.

I'D RATHER BE RICH. In this surprisingly sprightly comedy, Sandra Dee occupies an acute romantic triangle with Andy Williams and Robert Goulet while Hermione Gingold and Maurice Chevalier sharpen its points.

SEDUCED AND ABANDONED. A young girl's dishonor sets off a sunny Sicilian nightmare in Director Pietro Germi's savage tragicomedy, which is less warm but no less wicked than his memorable Divorce--Italian Style.

RHINO! African melodrama as it should be done--with scenic splendor and crackling humor--tied to a timely story about a hunt for a pair of rare white rhinos.

GIRL WITH GREEN EYES. A skillful British director, Desmond Davis, and a superlative British actress, Rita Tushingham, transform this rather banal tale of a young girl's affair with a middle-aged author into a movie of unusual warmth and wit.

A HARD DAY'S NIGHT. Hitting nary a false note, the Beatles shrewdly play the Beatles in a comedy that is yeah, yeah, yeah nearly all the way.

BOOKS

Best Reading

THE DIARY OF CHARLES FRANCIS ADAMS. The son of John Quincy and the father of Henry, Charles Francis lacked the dash and eloquence, but not the recording zeal, of the more famous members of his remarkable family. These first two of 18 volumes planned by the publishers show that as a youth he had a biting wit, a contempt for politics, and a "peculiar" susceptibility to comely young ladies.

THE WORDS, by Jean-Paul Sartre. After a series of increasingly labored, metaphysically morose works, Sartre has written a clear-eyed, warm, but very sad account of his early years, which were outwardly placid and pampered, inwardly tormented. The despair of modern existentialism, it turns out, is partly rooted in the struggle for sanity of a bookish, lonely child.

THIS GERMANY, by Rudolf Leonhardt. In a series of provocative essays, a West German journalist tries to clear up the many mysteries of the German character.

THE ITALIANS, by Luigi Barzini. Foreigners often love Italy for the wrong reasons, thinks one brilliant Italian journalist, who goes on to consider his countrymen in damaging detail. Italians are hams, says Barzini, and what is worse, they believe their own act; the result is a distrust of idealism and a retreat into cynicism.

VIVE MOI! by Sean O'Faolain. It took this Irish novelist 30 years to come to terms with his provincial Irish upbringing; in an engaging autobiography, he records the painful process and the dilemma of a man forever "impaled on one green corner of the universe."

MY AUTOBIOGRAPHY, by Charles Chaplin. In his account of his flamboyant life, the great comedian describes his miserably poor childhood in London in fascinating detail. Unfortunately, when he turns to love, politics, and even his happy fourth marriage to Oona O'Neill, he scants both fact and feeling in favor of the name-dropping prose of a standard show-biz autobiography.

REMINISCENCES, by Douglas MacArthur. The generosity and wisdom that characterized his leadership in the reconstruction of Japan are told with restraint, his firing by Truman in Korea as bitterly as if it had happened yesterday. A good writer, MacArthur comes through as a proud, realistic and yet oddly romantic man.

HERZOG, by Saul Bellow. This long-awaited novel will not quite establish Bellow in his long-reserved place in the U.S. literary pantheon. Though the writing and the characterizations are often brilliant, Anti-Hero Herzog is too passive and maudlin to carry a plot to a wholly satisfactory conclusion.

Best Sellers

FICTION

1. Candy, Southern and Hoffenberg (1 last week)

2. The Spy Who Came In from the Cold, Le Carre (2)

3. Herzog, Bellow (8)

4. Julian, Vidal (7)

5. The Rector of Justin, Auchincloss (5)

6. Armageddon, Uris (4)

7. You Only Live Twice, Fleming (3)

8. This Rough Magic, Stewart (6)

9. The Man, Wallace (10)

10. A Mother's Kisses, Friedman (9)

NONFICTION

1. The Invisible Government, Wise and Ross (1)

2. A Moveable Feast, Hemingway (2)

3. Reminiscences, MacArthur

4. The Italians, Barzini (4)

5. Harlow, Shulman (3)

6. A Tribute to John F. Kennedy, Salinger and Vanocur (5)

7. My Autobiography, Chaplin (8)

8. Diplomat Among Warriors, Murphy (10)

9. Mississippi: The Closed Society, Silver (7)

10. Four Days, U.P.I. and American Heritage (9)

*All times E.D.T.

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