Viewpoints

By Gerald Clarke

VANITY FAIR. Public Broadcasting.

Sunday, 9-10 p.m. E.D.T., repeated Saturday, 7:30-8:30 p.m. E.D.T.

An import from Britain, this five-part serialization of the Thackeray classic is one of the bright spots in the fall TV season. The story of Becky Sharp, English fiction's most famous social climber, Vanity Fair is a comedy of manners and immorals in Regency England.

Like Elizabeth R, The First Churchills, The Forsyte Saga, and other impressive British productions, Vanity Fair has been lavishly, even beautifully produced. Susan Hampshire, who earlier played Sarah Churchill and Fleur Forsyte, completes her collection of scheming bitches with Becky Sharp, the archetypical schemer. Hampshire manages to be both alluring and repelling, a hothouse feline with a tiger's claw. Always fascinating, she ought to be placed on the list of protected species.

ANNA AND THE KING. CBS. Sunday, 7:30-8 p.m. E.D.T.

This is a show whose time has come --and long since gone. After a dazzling movie based on Rodgers1 and Hammerstein's 1951 Broadway musical The King and I, the idea of the irascible but lovable monarch of Siam who is tamed by the priggish but lovable English schoolmarm should be retired with honors and prizes. Instead it is being dragged out week after week as an exotic situation comedy.

The presence of Yul Brynner, the King in both the play and the movie, only adds to the unfortunate sense of dejd vu. The viewer, no doubt like the star himself, keeps expecting his speeches to end in a song. Gorgeous sets, an even more gorgeous Anna (Samantha Eggar) and a brood of cute Oriental brats seem equally out of place in a show that is nothing more than the standard TV saga of the dumb daddy, the smart mamma and the smarter kids who walk over both of them.

M*A*S*H. CBS. Sunday, 8-8:30 p.m. E.D.T.

This show, which began as one of the most promising series of the new season, is now one of its biggest disappointments. Based on the 1970 movie of the same name, which followed the misadventures of an Army medical unit during the Korean War, M*A*S*H started out as television's first black comedy. It is now as bleached out as Hogan's Heroes.

The creeping blandness was probably foreordained. Commercial television is simply not prepared to accept the savage satire of the movie original. Beyond that, no series could hope to recreate the film's peculiar tension be tween comedy and horror. The writers seem to have given up their initial efforts and now stand on their cliches.

"Just a minute, isn't that Frank's bag?" a nurse asks a doctor. Reply: "I thought you were Frank's bag."

. Gerald Clarke

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