Saturday, Sept. 7

KELLOGG PRESENTS THE BANANA SPLITS ADVENTURE HOUR (NBC, 10:30-11:30 a.m.).* The Banana Splits, a quartet of rock musicians and comedians, whips up something new in the way of children's entertainment in a weekly series combining live action, sprightly comedy, music and cartoons. Premiere.

U.S. OPEN TENNIS CHAMPIONSHIPS (CBS, 4-6 p.m.). The semifinals and finals of the first U.S. Open Tennis Championships from Forest Hills Stadium, New York. Continued tomorrow, 3-5 p.m.

WORLD SERIES OF GOLF (NBC, 5-6:30 p.m.). Bob Goalby, Lee Trevino, Gary Player and Julius Boros, winners of the Masters, U.S. Open, British Open and P.G.A. respectively, play for $77,500 in prizes in a two-day, 36-hole tournament at the Firestone Country Club, Akron. Live coverage of the last five holes today and tomorrow at the same time.

N.F.L. FOOTBALL (CBS, 9:30 p.m. to conclusion). Baltimore Colts v. Dallas Cowboys in a preseason exhibition. Live from the Cotton Bowl in Dallas.

Sunday, Sept. 8

MEET THE PRESS (NBC, 1-1:30 p.m.). Interview with Maryland Governor Spiro Agnew, G.O.P. vice-presidential candidate.

AMERICAN LEAGUE FOOTBALL (NBC, 2-5 p.m.). Boston Patriots v. Buffalo Bills live from Buffalo.

AROUND THE WORLD OF MIKE TODD (ABC, 8-9 p.m.). Ethel Merman, Gypsy Rose Lee, Lowell Thomas, Art Buchwald and Elizabeth Taylor reminisce about the life and career of the late show-business entrepreneur. Orson Welles narrates.

Monday, Sept. 9

PREMIERE (CBS, 10-11 p.m.). "Higher and Higher, Attorneys at Law." Dustin Hoffman, star of the motion picture The Graduate, plays a young district attorney prosecuting a young man on a homicide charge.

Check local listings for date and time of this NET program:

NET JOURNAL. "The Quiet Revolution." A documentary study of the economic, social and political reforms of Czech Communist Party Leader Alexander Dubcek that led to last month's Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia. German, British and Czech films show the tense confrontation between Dubcek and Russia's Aleksei Kosygin and Leonid Brezhnev in August at Cierna.

THEATER

On Broadway

ROSENCRANTZ AND GUILDENSTERN ARE DEAD. If the Bard and Beckett had ever collaborated on a play about what went on behind the scenes at Elsinore, this wry existential comedy might have been the result. John Wood and Brian Murray are marvelously adept as Tom Stoppard's confused duo.

PLAZA SUITE. Neil Simon comes to bat again and raps out three short hits. George C. Scott and Maureen Stapleton are either hilarious or sentimental as they portray middle-aged couples in sometimes awkward, always amusing predicaments.

THE PRICE. Among the many dusty relics of the past in a family attic, the two brothers who are Arthur Miller's characters find living memories and smoldering emotions.

Off Broadway

A MOON FOR THE MISBEGOTTEN, one of Eugene O'Neill's last plays, laments a loveless trio. W. B. Brydon, Salome Jens and Mitchell Ryan give poignant portrayals of three emotional cripples hiding their numerous afflictions beneath much blather and rant. Theodore Mann directs a neatly tuned production at the Circle in the Square.

THE BOYS IN THE BAND. Playwright Mart Crowley's characters are first of all wonderfully human. Secondarily, they are homosexual. Kenneth Nelson, Leonard Frey and Cliff Gorman lead a sharply honed cast through dialogue of lacerating wit and excruciating humor.

JACQUES BREL IS ALIVE AND WELL AND LIVING IN PARIS, and meanwhile, in Manhattan, four performers render his songs with both passion and compassion.

THE NEGRO ENSEMBLE COMPANY alternates Peter Weiss's Song of the Lusitanian Bogey with Daddy Goodness, by Richard Wright and Louis Sapin.

YOUR OWN THING. Writer-Director Donald Driver proved to be the perfect collaborator to help slide Shakespeare's Twelfth Night into the 20th century with rock music and the unisex look of the with-it generation.

SCUBA DUBA. Bruce Jay Friedman's tense comedy makes a mockery of the sacred cows and shibboleths of an illiberal liberal, a manic hero who runs amuck on a Riviera holiday.

RECORDS

Theater Music

JACQUES BREL IS ALIVE AND WELL AND LIVING IN PARIS (Columbia, two LPs). Brel writes and sings in French, but his approach to life travels well. He attacks indifference, loneliness and unhappiness the way a windmill attacks the air, stirring up little tempests with whirring music and sharp imagery. Juxtaposing sweet, lyrical melodies with the words of protest and defiance, he speaks of "illness, war, the young ones, myself." A quartet of empathetic American performers interpret Brel in English with inventive arrangements and passionate delivery. The hopeful Bachelor's Dance (La Bourree du Celibataire), the chagrined Jackie ("If I could be for just one little hour cute, cute, cute in a stupid-assed way"), the infuriated Funeral Tango, all deal with material often ignored in music. Still, Brel's songs sculpt small monuments to some of life's more poignant moments.

HAIR. The Public Theater Cast Recording (RCA Victor) and the Broadway Cast Recording (RCA Victor). Last season, off-Broadway's Public Theater presented a tribute to the hyphenated generation with a fullscale, turned-on, freaked-out, pro-love, antiwar, love-rock bein. Billed as an American tribal rock musical, Hair made up in exuberance for what it lacked in finesse. Hitting the Broadway boards via a discotheque, it developed a larger cast of "hippies," a more forced spontaneity, a more self-conscious spirit. Recordings by both casts reflect the differences. The Public Theater cut is not as fully orchestrated and slick as the Broadway version, but it rings truer to the style of life and state of being it celebrates. Both communicate a lusty enthusiasm. The fresh Air ("Welcome, sulfur dioxide, Hello, carbon monoxide"), the moving Frank Mills ("I love him, but it embarrasses me to walk down the street with him"), and the optimistic greeting to the age of Aquarius ("No more falsehoods or derisions, golden living dreams of visions") are engaging enough to draw listeners of any age to the junior side of the generation gap.

THE BELIEVERS: THE BLACK EXPERIENCE IN SONG (RCA Victor). Sketching the path of the people brought from Africa to America, 13 full-voiced performers of this off-Broadway production lovingly interpret the music that expresses their history. The thunder drums of Ladji Camara provide a lightning introduction to the African chapter. The misery of the slave ships, the dreariness of the plantations, the vitality of the small churches, and the frustrations of city streets are caught in laments, work songs and field hollers, shouting gospels and spirituals, blues and jazz. While the arrangements can be faulted for lack of subtlety or sophistication, the selection of music from African chants to funky rock covers quickly and pleasurably the black contribution to song.

GEORGE M! (Columbia). The good old songs are still the good old songs, and little new dimension has been added by the score of the musical comedy tracing the life of Composer-Showman George M. Cohan. Joel Grey delivers the Yankee Doodle Dandy songs with combustible energy. But aficionados of the music of the period might do better to dig out their old 78s.

THE HAPPY TIME (RCA Victor). Can a successful world-traveled photographer ever find happiness settling down with a sincere schoolteacher in the small French-Canadian town of his birth? The answer is obvious, and so, too, are the music by John Kander and the lyrics by Fred Ebb from this routine Broadway show. Risking nothing, the songs accomplish little more. Star Robert Goulet comes across like a thin shadow of Maurice Chevalier. As one of the show's songs asks, "With Paris, Rome, Lisbon and Venice, why would anyone want to stay in St. Pierre?" Why, indeed?

CINEMA

ISABEL. Directed by her husband, Paul Almond, Genevieve Bujold plays a young girl passing rapidly into womanhood. For background there is the chilling landscape of Quebec's Gaspe Peninsula.

ROSEMARY'S BABY. Under Roman Polanski's direction, Ira Levin's bestselling chiller about the powers of darkness at work in a Manhattan apartment becomes a bewitching film that demonstrates the impressive acting ability of Mia Farrow.

THE HEART IS A LONELY HUNTER. Poetry always suffers in translation, and Carson McCullers' poetic novel is no exception to the rule. Yet the film has some worthwhile aspects: Alan Arkin's marvelous portrayal of a mute whose silence is deafening, and Sondra Locke as a poignant antiheroine.

THE BRIDE WORE BLACK. In his homage to Hitchcock, Francois Truffaut tells the story of a vengeful bride in a manner that mirrors the old master's style, as Jeanne Moreau tracks down a handful of murderers.

2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY. Director Stanley Kubrick attempts to create a new cinematic language to describe the future. His grammar is faultless, his pronunciation beautiful, his message obscure.

THE SEVENTH CONTINENT. Director Dusan Vukotic tells a sometimes ingenuous but often ingenious fairy story of two children who drift off to a magical, adult-free paradise.

BOOKS

Best Reading

WELCOME TO THE MONKEY HOUSE, by Kurt Vonnegut Jr. A literary time-machine trip--via short stories and essays--that gives the traveler a look at man's present dilemmas and the bleak Utopias promised for his future.

THE BEAUTYFUL ONES ARE NOT YET BORN, by Ayi Kwei Armah. A Ghanaian novelist's parable about man's struggle for liberty and dignity, staged in post-revolutionary West Africa.

THE CASE AGAINST CONGRESS, by Drew Pearson and Jack Anderson. Under the rolled logs and pork barrels, the political columnists find plenty of muck and a depressing number of congressional rakes.

THE DANCE OF GENGHIS COHN, by Romain Gary. A mordantly funny allegory about the ghost of an exterminated Jew who haunts an ex-Nazi.

HAROLD NICOLSON: THE LATER YEARS, 1945-1962. This, the concluding volume of the reminiscences of the late British writer-politician, reveals a man of deep sentiment and great candor, as well as a stylish memoirist.

THE AMERICAN CHALLENGE, by J.J. Servan-Schreiber. One of France's best-known journalists warns that his nation must institute sweeping educational, technological and managerial changes if it hopes to be influential in the modern world.

BRING LARKS AND HEROES, by Thomas Keneally. The love, rebellion and death of a young soldier garrisoned at an 18th century Australian penal colony provides the frame for an intense tale of degradation and courage.

Best Sellers

FICTION

1. Airport, Hailey (1 last week)

2. Couples, Updike (3)

3. True Grit, Portis (2)

4. Testimony of Two Men, Caldwell (4)

5. Red Sky at Morning, Bradford (6)

6. Myra Breckinridge, Vidal (5)

7. Topaz, Uris (7)

8. Heaven Help Us, Tarr (8)

9. Vanished, Knebel (9)

10. The Queen's Confession, Holt (10)

NON FICTION

1. The Money Game, 'Adam Smith' (1)

2. The Rich and the Super-Rich, Lundberg (3)

3. Between Parent and Child, Ginott (4)

4. Iberia, Michener (2)

5. The American Challenge, Servan-Schreiber (6)

6. The Right People, Birmingham (7)

7. Or I'll Dress You in Mourning, Collins and Lapierre (5)

8. The Naked Ape, Morris (8)

9. Soul on Ice, Cleaver

10. The Doctor's Quick Weight Loss Diet, Stillman and Baker (9)

* All times E.D.T.

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