BE MY VALENTINE, TV : <i> Thanks for Everything, but the Time Has Come . . . </i>

Happy (early) Valentine’s Day, television! I really love you. You’re such a safe addiction, one that doesn’t put cellulite on thighs, bald spots on tires, smoke in lungs or baby cribs in spare rooms.

Thank you, “American Bandstand” and “Soul Train,” for teaching me how to dance--and for still being around should I suddenly get an urge to learn “The Neutron Dance.” Thanks, Mr. Wizard, for providing the sum total of my formal education in physics.

Thank you, Tom Brokaw, for being the true successor to Walter Cronkite. You and Walter, with your sublimely relaxed body language, are the best at telling me the worst news and simultaneously reassuring me that we are gonna make it after all.

Thanks, news and documentary footage, for getting me in the gut. Obviously, I love the print media. But, oh television, no other medium knows how to reach me emotionally the way you do. One 10-second film clip of an Ethiopian mother cradling her dying child--or a fast tour of the homeless in L.A.’s tent city--is all I need to remember how blessed I am and how much work we luckier ones have yet to do.

Thanks, late-night TV, just for being there. It’s hard to have a lonely night with guys like Johnny Carson, Ted Koppel, Charlie Rose and Cal Worthington around. And should I get a real case of insomnia, ESPN’s “Business Times” (at the ridiculous hours of 3 to 6 a.m.) can almost make sleeplessness worthwhile.

Thank you, television magazine shows of every stripe, for taking me places I have neither the time, the inclination nor the invitations to go. Do I feel slighted that, once again, I didn’t get asked to the Inaugural Ball? Not nearly so much as when I have you as my escort, TV, taking me to the best of the balls, without a single step in the snow. Do I feel unadventurous because most of my vacations are back home again in Indiana? A little, but then I’ve got Mike and Morley and Harry and Ed and Diane serving as the smartest tour guides in the world.

Thanks, Diane, for demonstrating that it is possible for women to wear something other than business suits and still be taken seriously. And thanks, Oscars, Grammys, Tonys and all you other endless awards programs. You are the greatest fashion shows around.

Thank you, commercials everywhere, for frequently being better than the programs you subsidize. I could watch O.J. Simpson running through airports forever. And I look forward to Apple’s annual, one-shot Macintosh spot as much as I do to the Super Bowl.

Lately, though, it’s you junk food ads that have provided the most substantial commercial entertainment. Take that forlorn box of six Chicken McNuggets (wearing hair rollers no less) complaining to the crowded-but-festive 20-pack that “All you do is party all the time!” Or the Burger King teen-agers freaking out when they discover that McDonald’s fries (eeeeuuuuugh!) their hamburgers. Or that plain-spoken gent from Wendy’s lecturing us on the virtues of genuine chicken-breast sandwiches versus those made of processed chicken parts: “Parts is parts.”

OK, so you commercials are lousy as often as you’re terrific. There’s always the MTV alternative, that ever-ready ticket to music, madness and merriment (songs, sickness and sex, my mother would say).

And thank you, TV sports coverage, for focusing more often on the exhilarating “thrill of victory” than on the grim “agony of defeat”; I need as many heroes and heroines as I can get.

Yes, television, I owe you a lot. But the problem is you’re just too tempting. You’re so easy. We don’t really have a balanced relationship.

I’ve made a vow to be more alive in ‘85, TV. That means I’ll be spending more time with real people and less with “Real People,” more evenings with my family and fewer with “Family Feud.” I’m not running out, television, I’m taking a break . . . I’ll be right back . . . and that’s the way it is, Sunday, Feb. 10, 1985.