TELEVISION: One-Man Telephone Hour

For an hour on NBC last week, Actor Art Carney kept dialing telephone numbers, bugging long-distance operators, playing the sole part in a TV play about a sinking alcoholic. Desperately using the phone as a lifeline to the real world, he talked to his exwife, his daughter, his new fiancee and some old friends; he drank and wept, offered the drunk's typical, hopeless apologies, made glib cracks, and laughed with the sound of wind crossing a row of empty bottles. Call Me Back, a creditable but excessively maudlin first TV drama by...