Wednesday, December 16 CBS REPORTS (CBS, 7:30-8:30 p.m.).* A program devoted to Cellist Pablo Casals, now almost 88, featuring a visit to his home in Puerto Rico.

Thursday, December 17 PERRY COMO'S MUSIC HALL (NBC, 10-11 p.m.). Filmed in Rome, Perry's show offers the Sistine Choir, Soprano Roberta Peters and Puppeteer Burr Tillstrom.

Saturday, December 19 LIBERTY BOWL GAME (ABC, 12:30 p.m. to end). West Virginia plays Utah at Convention Hall in Atlantic City, N.J., scene of last summer's Democratic National Convention.

BLUEBONNET BOWL GAME (ABC, 3:30 p.m. to end). Mississippi plays Tulsa in Houston.

Sunday, December 20

CBS SPECIAL (CBS, 10-11 a.m.). Metropolitan Stars Giorgio Tozzi, Charles Anthony and Helen Vanni sing Berlioz' L'Enfance Du Christ with the CBS Symphony Orchestra.

DISCOVERY (ABC, 11:30 a.m.-12 noon). A look at Liverpool, England, home of the Beatles, Mersey Monsters, Undertakers and other musical mobs.

NBC OPERA (NBC, 3-4 p.m.). Gian Carlo Menotti's Christmas opera, Amahl and the Night Visitors, a rebroadcast of last year's performance starring Kurt Yaghjian as Amahl. Color.

NBC CHILDREN'S THEATER (NBC, 4-5 p.m.). Music in the round for sixto twelve-year-olds, encouraging audience and at-home participation. Color.

TWENTIETH CENTURY (CBS, 6-6:30 p.m.). A musical travelogue of Duke Ellington's recent tour of Japan.

PROFILES IN COURAGE (NBC, 6:30-7:30 p.m.). Walter Matthau stars in the story of Georgia Governor John Slaton, who in 1915 dared commute a controversial death sentence.

Monday, December 21 THE COMING OF CHRIST (NBC, 8:30-9 p.m.). Fourth annual presentation of "The Coming of Christ," the story of Christ's early years told through some 300 paintings of the late Middle Ages and Renaissance. Color.

Tuesday, December 22 BELL TELEPHONE HOUR (NBC, 10-11 p.m.). Special Christmas program starring Singer Howard Keel, Dancers Violette Verdy and Edmond Novak. Color.

THEATER On Broadway POOR RICHARD. Jean Kerr is still wearing the life-of-the-party grin from Mary, Mary, but behind the witticisms something sobering denies that life is that kind of party at all. With Alan Bates playing a lyric poet turned wench charmer and lush, the comedy is less funny than Mary, Mary but more probingly perceptive.

THE OWL AND THE PUSSYCAT. Diana Sands and Alan Alda give top performances: Sands is a prostitute with a tongue of brass who moves in on a bookish clerk (Alda) in Bill Manhoffs flip and funny version of the contemporary form of the mating dance.

LUV. Eli Wallach, Anne Jackson and Alan Arkin take a slapstick and tongue-wagging jaunt on a suspension bridge in Murray Schisgal's spoof of the theater of the absurd. Director Mike Nichols mixes word gags and sight gags with unerring skill.

OH WHAT A LOVELY WAR. For this music-hall documentary, Joan Littlewood uses laughter to hit where it hurts, blending sentimentality, song and satire. An adroit cast led by Victor Spinetti plays the men and women who lived, joked and suffered through World War I.

COMEDY IN MUSIC. Victor Borge toys with the ivories and tickles his audience in a 1 1/2-man romp with Co-Pianist and Foil Leonid Hambro.

FIDDLER ON THE ROOF. One of the most remarkably versatile talents of the contemporary stage, Zero Mostel breathes nostalgic life into this musical comedy derived from Sholom Aleichem's tales of Tevye and his five daughters.

Off Broadway

THE SECRET LIFE OF WALTER MITTY. Mitty might have difficulty recognizing himself in this musical exercise thinly based on the Thurber character, but a clever cast and fresh song, and dance provide a zesty evening.

CAMBRIDGE CIRCUS. A group of zanies have taken the British revue back to beyond-the-fringe lunacy in a parade of hilarious vignettes.

RECORDS

Christmas Music

Never before has the music of all ages been so munificently available. There are eight versions of Handel's Messiah; among the best are a dramatic, big-scaled production by Sir Thomas Beecham (RCA Victor) and a more authentic Baroque version conducted by Sir Adrian Boult, with Joan Sutherland (London). LProliferation has also produced such esoterica as Gregorian chants sung by Dominican nuns (Philips), and a class-conscious account of the Nativity written by Scholem Asch and read by Pete Seeger. Other Christmas offerings:

THE PLAY OF HEROD (2 LPs; Decca) is a 12th century church music drama intended at the time "to fortify the faith of the unlettered vulgar." It is sung in Latin under the direction of Noah Greenberg.

HEINRICH SCHUTZ: THE CHRISTMAS ORATORIO (Angel). Born 100 years before Bach and Handel, Schiitz was their musical ancestor, but his oratorio is beautiful in its own right. Hans Thamm conducts his Windsbach Boys' Choir and a small ensemble that gets arresting effects with such archaic instruments as the clarino and the theorboe.

J. S. BACH: CHRISTMAS ORATORIO (3 LPs; Musical Heritage). A few choral passages are muddy, but Fritz Werner and the Pforzheim Chamber Orchestra give the oratorio a moving and bright performance. Tenor Helmut Krebs is an exceptionally expressive Evangelist, and the voice of Soprano Agnes Giebel floats lightly in a nimbus of violins.

J. S. BACH: MUSIC OF JUBILEE (Columbia). Virtuoso E. Power Biggs has appropriated for his organ and a chamber orchestra whatever music of Bach's he felt was jubilant enough. Thus Biggs performs a good many songs without words, including Jesu, Joy of Man's Desiring and Ah, Dearest Jesu from the Christmas Oratorio. Purists will object, but the jubilation is continuous and unrestrained.

SING NOWELL (London) shows that 15th century verses about 15th century "Nowell" fit 20th century music about 20th century Noel. New carols and new arrangements of familiar ones are by leading British composers, including Benjamin Britten, Peter Racine Fricker, Malcolm Williamson. The largely a cappella performance by the Elizabethan Singers is accented by fine solos and organ.

CINEMA

TO LOVE. Lust at first sight is good for grand though gross guffaws in Swedish Director Jorn Donner's tale of a repressed young widow (Harriet Andersson) who meets a fast-moving travel agent at her husband's funeral and gives nary a thought to the mourning after.

IL BIDONE. Though it sometimes seems a fumbling first version of 81/2, this Italian tragicomedy about a smalltime swindler (Broderick Crawford) in bishop's clothing stirs interest as the missing volume of Director Federico Fellini's "trilogy of Solitude" begun wi:h La Strada and ending in Le Notti di Cabiria.

THE PUMPKIN EATER. Three husbands, a swarm of progeny and a nervous collapse leave a well-kept wife with an unkempt psyche in this marriage-go-round directed by Britain's Jack Clayton (Room at the Top) and played like a house afire by Anne Bancroft.

SEND ME NO FLOWERS. As a suburban hypochondriac who feels the end is nigh, Rock Hudson prepares Wife Doris Day for widowhood, while Tony Randall keeps the fun alive as a macabre neighbor.

SEANCE ON A WET AFTERNOON. An unhappy medium (Kim Stanley) and her timorous spouse (Richard Attenborough) bumble through a kidnaping plot, and Director Bryan Forbes turns it into one of those throat-drying English thrillers in which every second seems split.

MY FAIR LADY. Bountiful as ever, the musical classic by Lerner and Loewe out of G. B. Shaw retains Professor Rex Harrison as the Edwardian phonetics expert who transforms Audrey Hepburn from a cockney flower peddler into a proper lady.

WOMAN IN THE DUNES. Trapped in a hovel at the bottom of a sandpit, a man and woman find that their hellhole offers the only real freedom in this luminous, violent allegory by Japanese Director Hiroshi Teshigahera.

TOPKAPI. Istanbul is a thieves' carnival, with Melina Mercouri eying the emeralds and Peter Ustinov scaling the laughs in Director Jules Dassin's droll comedy of love and larceny, his best since Rifth.

BOOKS Best Reading THE FOUNDING FATHER, by Richard Whalen. The facts of Joe Kennedy's career, the fortunes he made in oil and real estate, and his swift conversion of money into power for himself and his sons need no embellishment; his life is a blueprint for the wheeler-dealer and the kingmaker.

HENRY ADAMS: THE MAJOR PHASE, by Ernest Samuels. Covering the last 30 years of Adams' life, this final volume of Samuels' massive biography tells of the people and thinking that influenced Adams in the writing of his greatest books, Mont St. Michel and Chartres and the classic Education of Henry Adams.

THE HORSE KNOWS THE WAY, by John O'Hara. More short stories by one of the all-time masters of the art. With this, his fourth collection in as many years, O'Hara is threatening to cut off the supply to concentrate on long fiction.

SELECTED LETTERS OF ROBERT FROST, edited by Lawrance Thompson. This collection shows the poet's wit, shrewdness, ego-and also the courage that saw him through an unrelenting succession of family tragedies.

A LITTLE LEARNING, by Evelyn Waugh. The first part of the British satirist's autobiography is a warm, impressionistic recollection of childhood, a spirited account of high living at Oxford and a miserable tour as a master in a bleak boys' school in Wales-in fact, almost all the ingredients of Waugh's brilliant first novel, Decline and Fall.

HERZOG, by Saul Bellow. The misery of an unwanted divorce and custody case and the psychological desolation they inflict on a man of good will are remorselessly pursued by Bellow.

LIFE WITH PICASSO, by Franchise Gilot. In a rich year for memoirs, this account of the great artist by his ex-mistress of nine years holds a surprisingly high place. Mile. Gilot is frank about her own emotions as well as Picasso's, making her revelation of living with genius meaningful as well as authentic.

MARKINGS, by Dag Hammarskjold. This disturbing book is so in demand that it is out of stock across most of the U.S. It is a record of the religious doubt and mystical exaltation that possessed the late U.N. Secretary-General during times of crisis and tedium.

OF POETRY AND POWER, edited by Erwin Glikes and Paul Schwaber. One of the few books of enduring significance among the 60-odd about President Kennedy published since the assassination. It is a collection of poems, written in grief and occasionally in anger, by many of America's most talented poets.

Best Sellers

FICTION 1. Herzog, Bellow (1 last week)

2. The Rector of Justin, Auchincloss (2)

3. The Man, Wallace (6)

4. Candy, Southern and Hoffenberg (3)

5. This Rough Magic, Stewart (5)

6. The Spy Who Came In from the Cold, Le Carre (8)

7. You Only Live Twice, Fleming (7)

8. Julian, Vidal (4)

9. The Brigadier and the Golf Widow, Cheever (10)

10. The Horse Knows the Way, O'Hara

NONF1CTION

1. Markings, Hammarskjold (1)

2. Reminiscences, MacArthur (2)

3. The Kennedy Years, the New York Times and Viking Press (6)

4. My Autobiography, Chaplin (3)

5. The Kennedy Wit, Adler (7)

6. The Italians, Barzini (4)

7. The Warren Commission Report

8. Life with Picasso, Gilot

9. Patton: Ordeal and Triumph, Farago (5)

10. The Words, Sartre (9)

*All times E.S.T.

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