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Mr. Magoo's Christmas Carol (NBC, 7:30-8:30 p.m.). A cartoon version of Dickens' story, featuring Jim Backus as Mr. Magoo and Ebenezer Scrooge.
Close-Up (ABC, 10:30-11 p.m.). A sweeping look at seven-year-old kids everywhere, from Japan to Texas, Italy to India, what they think, do, say and suffer.
THEATER
On Broadway
Never Too Late, by Sumner Arthur Long, is a one-gag, all-night laugh show about a chagrined man of 60 who finds himself facing the unexpected onslaught of second fatherhood. As the father-to-be, Paul Ford is an excruciatingly funny anatomy of melancholy, and Orson Bean, as his son-in-law, is a hilariously beguiling buffoon.
Little Me. In a one-man comic population explosion, Sid Caesar plays all seven men in the farcical musical-comedy saga of Belle Poitrine, the all-American show girl originally lampooned in Patrick Dennis' novel. For rampagingly frivolous fun, this is it.
Beyond the Fringe. Four monstrously clever and wildly amusing young graduates of Oxford and Cambridge gleefully smash the icons of any and all Establishments, from Shakespeare to nuclear defense.
Tchin-Tchin. Opposites, who are also rejects, attract each other in this sad, amusing, pathetic fable about an Italo-American contractor and a proper Englishwoman who try to be adult about their mutually adulterous spouses. Margaret Leighton and Anthony Quinn give the two roles rare distinction.
Mr. President impeaches taste and demeans the considerable talents of Robert Ryan and Nanette Fabray, but the public has given this musical an unparalleled vote of confidence with an advance ticket sale of over $2,600,000.
Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, by Edward Albee, examines the sterility of a marriage, and of modern U.S. life, with cold fury. As the warring couple, Arthur Hill and Uta Hagen give performances of indelible brilliance.
The Affair has been expertly adapted from C. P. Snow's novel and revolves around the issue of justice toward an ideological enemy. A predominantly British cast evokes the donnish flavor of a university common room turned courtroom.
Off Broadway
The Dumbwaiter and The Collection,
by Harold Pinter. These two one-acters combine the comedy and menace of England's most powerfully provocative playwright. Alan Schneider's direction of a splendid cast seismographically records volcanic shifts of meaning.
BOOKS
Best Reading
The Conquest of London and The Middle Years, Vols. II and III of Henry James, by Leon Edel. Author Edel's vast work, which will run to four volumes and which promises to be the definitive biography of James, is written with a scholar's exhaustive combing of detail and a novelist's flair for mood and motive.
Two Stories and a Memory, by Giuseppe di Lampedusa. Excellent minor pieces by the Sicilian prince whose elegiac novel of nobility's erosion, The Leopard, was a bestseller two years ago. The author's memoir of the great houses he lived in as a child is particularly good.
The Cape Cod Lighter, by John O'Hara. The author writes better than ever of heels and down-at-the-heels in Gibbsville, Pa., and small-town New Jersey.