Wednesday, March 6

THE UNDERSEA WORLD OF JACQUES COUSTEAU (ABC, 7:30-8:30 p.m.).* Cousteau's crew goes down 80 ft. in the Indian Ocean to study the struggle for survival among such creatures of the coral reefs as moray eels, poisonous lion fish and killer crabs camouflaged like sponges.

THE NOW GENERATION (ABC, 8:30-9 p.m.). Presenting Mia Farrow and her thoughts on the Viet Nam war, her work and, of course, on her meditation in India with Guru Maharishi Mahesh Yogi.

KRAFT MUSIC HALL (NBC, 9-10 p.m.). Musicians Al Hirt and Pete Fountain, Singer Lana Cantrell and Dancer Peter Gennaro in New Orleans for "Mardi Gras 1968."

MONTE CARLO . . . C'EST LA ROSE (ABC, 9-10 p.m.). Princess Grace conducts a tour of her tiny domain, accompanied by British Comedian Terry-Thomas and French Singers Framboise Hardy and Gilbert Becaud.

THE RISE AND FALL OF THE THIRD REICH (ABC, 10-11 p.m.). A three-part TV adaptation of William Shirer's 1960 history traces the course of Hitler's life through film clips, interviews with onetime Nazis and further reflections by Author Shirer on political and economic conditions in Germany from 1920 to 1945. Part 2 will be shown at the same time on Friday and Part 3 from 9:30-10:30 on Saturday night.

Thursday, March 7

. . . AND DEBBIE MAKES SIX (ABC, 8-9 p.m.). Bob Hope, Bobby Darin, Donald O'Connor, Frank Gorshin and Jim Nabors join the lady for an hour of song, dance and comedy.

CBS THURSDAY NIGHT MOVIES (CBS, 9-11 p.m.). The Best Man (1964), Gore Vidal's drama about the political infighting at presidential conventions, with Henry Fonda, Cliff Robertson, Edie Adams and Margaret Leighton.

Friday, March 8

BELL TELEPHONE HOUR (NBC, 10-11 p.m.). A searching look at ballet through the person of the New York City Ballet Company's soloist, Edward Villella. The camera studies him onstage performing two George Balanchine ballets, offstage choreographing a new pas de deux, and at home with his wife, Ballerina Janet Greschler.

Sunday, March 10

NATIONAL HOCKEY LEAGUE (CBS, 2-4:30 p.m.). Toronto Maple Leafs v. Chicago Black Hawks, at Chicago.

NBC EXPERIMENT IN TELEVISION (NBC, 3-4 p.m.). "This Is Marshall McLuhan: The Medium Is the Massage" employs the medium of television to explain--or at least spotlight--some of the communications philosopher's controversial ideas. Repeat.

BIG THREE GOLF (NBC, 4-5 p.m.). Last in a series of four matches between Arnold Palmer, Jack Nicklaus and Gary Player competing for $50,000. Filmed at the Dorado Beach Golf Club in Puerto Rico.

CBS CHILDREN'S FILM FESTIVAL (CBS, 4:30-5:30). In the Czech film The Goal Keeper Also Lives on Our Street, a famous hockey goalie helps a young boy realize his dreams of victory on the ice.

ABC SUNDAY NIGHT MOVIE (ABC, 8-11:10 p.m.). For the occasional viewer who may have missed it first time around on TV (some 71 million tuned in), The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957), starring Alec Guinness, William Holden and Jack Hawkins.

Tuesday, March 12

The New Hampshire presidential primary will be covered by the three commercial networks, with political scientists and statisticians joining correspondents and commentators to tabulate and analyze the results. CBS and ABC air their specials from 10-11 p.m., NBC from 11:30 to midnight.

THEATER

On Broadway

PLAZA SUITE proves once again that Neil Simon is a master mirthologist, as in two of three one-act plays he adroitly sketches a satire and broadly paints a farce. However, in the first play, Visitor from Mamaroneck, he achieves a new tone of rue in the poignant confrontation between a much-married duo. The skill of Director Mike Nichols and Actors George C. Scott and Maureen Stapleton matches that of the playwright.

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 ever fresh guilts and frustrations.

JOE EGG. In moments of pain, a man may laugh, and in a desperate situation, he may take refuge from his grief in humor. In British Playwright Peter Nichols' comedy, Albert Finney and Zena Walker bounce from sadness to clowning and back again as the parents of a child described as a "wegetable."

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.

PANTAGLEIZE. History is a farce, says Michel de Ghelderode in his play about one lovely day when a man looking for his destiny collides with a revolution, and owing to circumstances beyond their comprehension or control, they destroy each other.

Off Broadway

YOUR OWN THING takes the plot of Twelfth Night, shakes it up, and spins it around until it spills out as a rock musical, put over with professional punch by an energetic and ingratiating young cast.

RECORDS

Pop

THE BUTTERFIELD BLUES BAND: THE RESURRECTION OF PIGBOY CRABSHAW (Elektra). Few forms of music sound more authentic than lowdown blues, and Butterfield's band provides a refreshing collection of wild wails about oldtime, alltime troubles. While the style is no newer than the subjects, it is good to hear young musicians who have rediscovered the compelling mournfulness of harmonicas, saxophones and on-key melodies.

TIM HARDIN: 2 (Verve Forecast). Though some teeny-boppers would consider his topics awfully untopical, there is always a tremendous old-fashioned poignancy in Hardin's roughhewn songs. And some of them are blessed with a surprising humanism: "Ev'ry moment means so much/ When your baby's skin is there to touch/ Every moment bringing more/ That's what mother and father are for." There are times, though, when Hardin's hesitant hoarseness does a disservice to his music; other folk singers, particularly Joan Baez, are more capable of illuminating the songs' best qualities and subduing their recurrent banality.

RICHIE HAVENS: SOMETHING ELSE AGAIN (Verve Forecast). Havens ranks with the best of the new generation of folk singers. His voice has a fine, foggy pliancy, and his arrangements complement rather than smother his equally misty messages: "The next time that we meet/ Will be a rerun/ You'll say, 'Be one.' "

JOHN MAYALL'S BLUES BREAKERS CRUSADE (London). To each his own music, but to hell with anything that isn't blues, is the message of this album. Blues are not as dead as most jazz, but John Mayall's crew sings and writes as if they were in imminent danger of extinction. ("It is time for a major blues crusade! Is it right that a great artiste should have to die for his music to be acknowledged?") The English have long proved that they can master American idioms, and Mayall is no exception. He can weep, holler and groan with the best, and though he pleads that his fan mail be sent to Godalming, Surrey, most listeners will wonder if it shouldn't go to Biloxi.

JANIS IAN: FOR ALL THE SEASONS OF YOUR MIND (Verve Forecast). All Miss Ian needs is a touch more of faith, hope and charity--especially charity. No one is more difficult to contend with than a condescending adolescent, and 16-year-old Ian is so highly talented that her condescension is all the harder to take. Yet her talent usually wins in the end. This album contains some of her most felicitous efforts since Society's Child. Her young, flutelike voice adds just the right hue of blues to the suicidal notes of Insanity Comes Quietly to the Structured Mind, and for a change she breaks up in giggles while satirizing country music in And 1 Did Ma.

ClNEMA

CHARLIE BUBBLES. Albert Finney proves that he can direct as well as act, but leaves some question as to whether he ought to in this stupefyingly familiar film about a writer who has descended into a hell of modern materialism.

POOR COW. Actress Carol White is totally convincing as a woman who can find a bit of fun and some fatuous hope in the London-slum flat she shares with a thief.

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 cover a lot of blemishes.

THE PRODUCERS. A 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, Gene Wilder) uproariously funny for at least half its running time, after which Mel Brooks the writer fails Mel Brooks the director by slipping into something sentimental.

BOOKS

Best Reading

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. WHILE SIX MILLION DIED, by Arthur D. Morse. By documenting the acts of indifference against European Jewry during World War II, both authors challenge Hannah Arendt's explosive argument that the Final Solution succeeded with the acquiescence of its victims.

VANITY OF DULUOZ, by Jack Kerouac. The beat hero of the 1950s shows himself to be the prodigal returned in this autobiographical novel of a man who regains his innocence.

CONTACT ON GORKY STREET, by Greville Wynne. Spying and its hazards are brought into chilling focus in the memoir of a British agent who was an important channel of information before his discovery by the Russians.

DEATH IN LIFE: SURVIVORS OF HIROSHIMA, by Robert Jay Lifton. An American psychiatrist discerns the effects of large-scale disasters on behavior as he sifts the recollections of 75 Japanese who lived through the first atomic bombing.

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

TO BROOKLYN WITH LOVE, by Gerald Green. The author of The Last Angry Man summons up the forgotten sights and sounds of the 1930s in this novel about a wild summer in the life of a twelve-year-old boy.

THE NAKED APE, A ZOOLOGIST'S STUDY OF THE HUMAN ANIMAL, by Desmond Morris. A controversial romp through millions of years of man's evolution, concluding that man may be the sexiest but not the sanest primate.

Best Sellers

FICTION

1. Vanished, Knebel (3 last week)

2. Topaz, Uris (1)

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

4. Christy, Marshall (4)

5. Myra Breckinridge, Vidal (8)

6. The Instrument, O'Hara (7)

7. Where Eagles Dare, MacLean (6)

8. The Exhibitionist, Sutton (5)

9. The Chosen, Potok (10)

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

NON-FICTION

1. The Naked Ape, Morris (3)

2. Nicholas and Alexandra, Massie (1)

3. Our Crowd, Birmingham (2)

4. Between Parent and Child, Ginott (5)

5. Tolstoy, Troyat (4)

6. The Way Things Work: An Illustrated Encyclopedia of Technology (7)

7. Rickenbacker, Rickenbacker (6)

8. The Economics of Crisis, Janeway

9. Memoirs: 1925-1950, Kennan (9)

10. Thomas Wolfe, Turnbull (8)

* All times E.S.T.

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