TELEVISION

Wednesday, April 16 SPECTRUM (NET, 8-8:30 p.m.).* Does the need for research funds from federal sources place scientists under Government control? The issue is debated on "Science and Politics," Part 1.

KRAFT MUSIC HALL (NBC, 9-10 p.m.).

"Johnny Cash ... On the Road" stars country-and-Western troubadour Cash, includes Kate Smith, Don Ho and Paul Lynde. A country-music concert medley with Cash's touring show provides the grand finale.

Thursday, April 17 CHRYSLER PRESENTS THE BOB HOPE SPECIAL (NBC, 8:30-9:30 p.m.). Patti Page, Jack Nicklaus, Jane Wyman and Tina Louise join in the antics on Bob's final show of the season.

THURSDAY NIGHT MOVIES (CBS, 9-11 p.m.). UMC (University Medical Center), a pilot-movie harbinger of the autumn's scheduled epidemic of doctor series, stars James Daly, Maurice Evans, Richard Brad ford, Kevin McCarthy, Kim Stanley and Edward G. Robinson.

Friday, April 1 8 THE SAINT (NBC, 10-11 p.m.). Premiere of the series, returning for the summer. Roger Moore as Simon Templar is involved in a -L-.1,000,000 robbery and helps out the usual distressed damsel.

Saturday, April 19 MAJOR LEAGUE BASEBALL (NBC, 2 p.m. to conclusion). Oakland A's v. the Kansas City Royals, at Kansas City.

TOURNAMENT OF CHAMPIONS (ABC, 4-5 p.m.). A field including Jack Nicklaus, Arnold Palmer, Billy Casper, Lee Trevino and last year's champ Don January will be trying for the $30,000 first prize. Final round Sunday, 4-5:30 p.m. From La Cos ta Country Club, Rancho La Costa,Calif.

CBS GOLF CLASSIC (CBS, 4-5:30). Finals of the season-long tournament, with George Archer and Bob Lunn v. Al Geiberger and Dave Stockton; last 18 holes Sunday from 4 to 5:30.

Sunday, April 20 NATIONAL HOCKEY LEAGUE (CBS, 2-5 p.m.). Stanley Cup Play-Off.

EXPERIMENT IN TELEVISION (NBC, 4:30-5:30 p.m.). "Big Sur,"Frank Gagliano's original fable, tells the tale of a middle-aged Midwesterner's drive to California. The role is played by Gene Troobnick; James Coco, Billy Dee Williams and Kate Harrington are some of the characters he meets along the way.

BROADWAY '69-THE TONY AWARDS (NBC, 10-11:30 p.m.). The cream of Broadway assembles to give and receive recognition for the past year's plays and performances; co-hosts are Alan King and Diahann Car roll. Among those presenting awards will be Dustin Hoffman, Gwen Verdon and Leslie Uggams.

Monday, April 21 SPOON RIVER (CBS, 10-11 p.m.). A com pressed version of Edgar Lee Masters' small-town Americana, with Jason Robards, Charles Aidman, Joyce Van Patten and Jennifer West. The original, on Broadway, was a critical success in 1963.

Tuesday, April 22

WHITE PAPER: THE ORDEAL OF THE AMERICAN CITY (NBC, 7:30-9 p.m.). White society in a "crisis of spirit." The example here in microcosm, San Francisco State College, is examined by Frank McGee.

NET FESTIVAL (NET, 9-10 p.m.). "The World of David Amram" looks into the panoramic (jazz to cantatas) musical talents of the 38-year-old composer. His Three Songs for America, written in memory of John F. Kennedy, Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King, will be premiered on the program.

THEATER

1776 presents a stereotypical version of the key signers of the Declaration of Independence and their sometimes abrasive, sometimes soporific deliberations at the Second Continental Congress. The musical succeeds only in bringing the heroic, tempestuous birth of a people and a polity down to a feeble vaudevillian jape.

HAMLET. Everything about Ellis Rabb's APA production is peculiarly wrong, including Rabb's portrayal of Hamlet as if the Prince of Denmark were in desperate need of geriatric drugs.

IN THE MATTER OF J. ROBERT OPPENHEIMER. Heinar Kipphardt's version of the 1954 Atomic Energy Commission hearings on Oppenheimer is more dissertation than drama; the play is as inert as stone and a cruel test of audience patience.

CELEBRATION is a musical fairy tale by Tom Jones and Harvey Schmidt, co-creators of The Fantasticks. With a straight melodic line and unpretentiously apt lyrics, the show is intimate and beguiling.

PLAY IT AGAIN, SAM. Woody Allen is the hero of his own play about a neurotic young man, rejected by girls even in his dreams, who is finally coached into bed with his best friend's wife by his fantasy hero, Humphrey Bogart.

FORTY CARATS is a comedy of new marital modes and manners featuring a lovely Julie Harris as a middle-aged lady wooed and won by a 22-year-old lad.

HADRIAN VII. Alec McCowen exhibits an outstanding command of technique as Frederick William Rolfe in this deft dramatization of Rolfe's novel of wish fulfillment, Hadrian the Seventh.

Off Broadway

INVITATION TO A BEHEADING. As a play Russell McGrath's adaptation of the Vladimir Nabokov novel is less than successful, but Ming Cho Lee's set is elegant, Gerald Freedman's direction is deft, and the acting is high-styled and full of flair.

STOP, YOU'RE KILLING ME is an evening of three slightly savage and humorous one-act plays by Novelist James Leo Herlihy, performed ably by the Theater Company of Boston.

ADAPTATION--NEXT. Elaine May directs both her own play, Adaptation and Terrence McNally's Next in an evening of perceptive and richly comic one-acters.

DAMES AT SEA. A delightful spoof of the movie musicals of the '30s, with an enthusiastic and gifted minicast of six, including Bernadette Peters as Ruby, who taps her way to stardom in one day.

TO BE YOUNG, GIFTED AND BLACK is a loving tribute to Negro Playwright Lorraine Hansberry presented by a talented interracial cast in which whites as well as blacks speak for her.

CINEMA

GOODBYE, COLUMBUS is a slick adaptation of Philip Roth's novella about being young, in love and Jewish. Director Larry Peerce is a canny craftsman, and if his film is a little too glossy, his actors--especially beautiful newcomer Ali MacGraw--all perform with warm and endearing conviction.

THE ASSASSINATION BUREAU. This is the one to take the family to see on the next rainy Saturday afternoon. Oliver Reed and Diana Rigg battle bad guys all across, and sometimes above, Europe in an unceasing repertory of derring-do that will keep the kids enthralled and their parents amused.

STOLEN KISSES. Francois Truffaut continues his cinematic autobiography in this lyrical souvenir of a young man's adolescence and sometimes reluctant journey into manhood.

THE NIGHT OF THE FOLLOWING DAY. Marlon Brando is back in brilliant form as a hipster-criminal in this thriller directed by Hubert Cornfield, who uses a story about kidnaping as an excuse to conduct a surreal seminar on the poetics of violence.

I AM CURIOUS (YELLOW) is the movie everyone has heard about but few will be able to sit through. Its widely publicized sex scenes are secondary to a seemingly interminable journalistic narrative about youth (mainly Lena Nyman and Borje Ahlstedt) and politics in Sweden.

THE FIXER. John Frankenheimer has directed this adaptation of Bernard Malamud's novel with care and dedication. Alan Bates, Dirk Bogarde and Ian Holm all seem perfect in their roles.

THE STALKING MOON pits canny frontier scout Gregory Peck against an ingenious Indian bent on a bloody and horrible revenge. The outcome is predictable, but Director Robert Mulligan manages a couple of good chills along the way.

SWEET CHARITY. A great deal of energy obviously went into this project. Most of it, including Shirley MacLaine's performance as a dance-hall hostess, goes to waste.

RED BEARD. Japan's Akira Kurrsawa, who is counted as one of the world's greatest moviemakers, takes a simple story of the spiritual growth of a young doctor and transforms it into an epic morality play.

THE SHAME. Ingmar Bergman ponders once again the problems of an artist's moral responsibility. This is his 29th film and one of his best, with resonant performances by Liv Ullman, Max von Sydow and Gunnar Bjornstrand.

BOOKS

Best Reading

SLAUGHTERHOUSE-FIVE, by Kurt Vonnegut Jr. Through flashbacks to the fire bombing of Dresden in World War II, this agonizing, outrageous, funny, profoundly rueful fable tries to say something about the timeless nature of human cruelty and self-protective indifference.

URGENT COPY, by Anthony Burgess. In a collection of brilliant short pieces about a long list of literary figures (from Dickens to Dylan Thomas), the author brings many a gaudy critical chicken home to roost.

EDWARD LEAR, THE LIFE OF A WANDERER, by Vivien Noakes. In this excellent biography, the Victorian painter, poet, fantasist, and author of A Book of Nonsense is seen as a kindly, gifted man who courageously tried to stay cheerful despite an astonishing array of diseases.

THE SECRET WAR FOR EUROPE, by Louis Hagen. As he explores the development of espionage agencies and replays a host of cold war spy cases, the author presents a detailed view of politics and espionage in Germany since 1945.

REFLECTIONS UPON A SINKING SHIP, by Gore Vidal. A collection of perceptively sardonic essays about the Kennedys, Tarzan, Susan Sontag, pornography, the 29th Republican Convention, and other aspects of what Vidal sees as the declining West.

THE MILITARY PHILOSOPHERS, by Anthony Powell. The ninth volume in his serial novel, A Dance to the Music of Time, expertly convoys Powell's innumerable characters through the intrigue, futility, boredom and courage of World War II.

GRANT TAKES COMMAND, by Bruce Catton. Completing the trilogy begun by the late historian Lloyd Lewis, Catton employs lucidity and laconic humor as he follows the taciturn general to his final victory at Appomattox.

TORREGRECA, by Ann Cornelisen. Full of an orphan's love for her adopted town, the author has turned a documentary of human adversity in southern Italy into the unflinching autobiography of a divided heart.

PORTNOY'S COMPLAINT, by Philip Roth. This frenzied monologue by a sex-obsessed Jewish bachelor on a psychiatrist's couch becomes a comic novel about the absurdly painful wounds created by guilt and puritanism.

THE TRAGEDY OF LYNDON JOHNSON, by Eric F. Goldman. Instant history, like instant coffee, can sometimes be remarkably palatable. At least it is in this memoir by a former White House aide who sees L.B.J. as "an extraordinarily gifted President who was the wrong man from the wrong place at the wrong time under the wrong circumstances."

Best Sellers

FICTION 1. Portnoy's Complaint, Roth (1 last week)

2. The Godfather, Puzo (3)

3. The Salzburg Connection, Maclnnes (2)

4. Sunday the Rabbi Stayed Home, Kemelman (6)

5. A Small Town in Germany, le Carre (4)

6. Airport, Hailey (5)

7. The Voyeur, Sutton

8. The Lost Queen, Lofts

9. The Vines of Yarabee, Eden (10)

10. Force 10 from Navarone, MacLean (7)

NONFICTION 1. The 900 Days, Salisbury (1)

2. The Arms of Krupp, Manchester (3)

3. Miss Craig's 21 -Day Shape-Up Program for Men and Women, Craig (2)

4. The Money Game, 'Adam Smith' (5)

5. Jennie, Martin (6)

6. The Tragedy of Lyndon Johnson, Goldman (4)

7. Grant Takes Command, Catton

8. The Joys of Yiddish, Rosten (10)

9. The Valachi Papers, Maas (7)

10. The Trouble with Lawyers, Bloom (8)

*All times E.S.T.

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