IF SNYDER’S HOT, WILL HE GET OUT OF THE KITCHEN?

It’s another afternoon in Los Angeles.

On Channel 4, Phil Donahue is typically Donahueing. It’s the full Phil. Roaming and foaming. Racing and pacing.

Donahue has a coup. Appearing on his syndicated talk show are the parents of Baby Jesse, the nationally publicized California infant suffering from hypoplastic left-heart syndrome.

By now, everyone knows that Baby Jesse desperately needs a heart donor. While pleading their case on “Donahue,” Baby Jesse’s parents are notified that a donor has been found and that Loma Linda University Medical Center will perform the transplant. Cheers. Tears. Kisses. Hugs.

Although a controversy will follow about the role of media publicity in the assignment of organ donors, the Baby Jesse hour is great TV.

While Baby Jesse’s good news is beamed to America via “Donahue,” big, bold, booming, boomeranging Tom Snyder is on Channel 7 hosting a segment of his local talk/call-in show that will draw the biggest mail response in its 4 1/2-month history. Hot is hardly the word. This time, Snyder is really cooking.

Literally.

It’s the debut of “Tom’s Kitchen.” Now 50, Snyder has lived on the edge through much of his 30-year broadcasting career, including a checkered nine years hosting NBC’s late-night “Tomorrow” series, followed by two miserable years anchoring the news at WABC-TV in New York. But now he is really walking the high wire. Now, for the first time on TV, he is cooking fish in a dishwasher.

“So Donahue had on the parents of Baby Jesse,” Chef Tom said Monday while having breakfast in the Bel-Air Country Club. “That’s fine. The cooking show was booked two weeks in advance, and I liked the cooking show and the audience liked the cooking show.”

Snyder said “Tom’s Kitchen” was requested by viewers. “We said, ‘OK, but we’re gonna give ‘em different cooking, a spoof on cooking: Cooking fish in a dishwasher.’ Now this is big.”

Really, really big. The response was two sacks of mail. “Two sacks of mail on cooking fish in a dishwasher,” Snyder said. “What does that tell you?”

It tells you that the cooking show, which also featured super-chef Wolfgang Puck and huggable Jackie Olden of radio’s “KNX Food News Hour,” was a gleeful TV caper, every bit as cheeky in its own way as Donahue’s Baby Jesse show. And it tells you to expect “Tom’s Kitchen II.”

TV is treacherous. Once upon a time, Snyder soared on NBC. He was unpredictable, impossible, imponderable. He was fast, sharp and funny, noisy and nudniky, lovable and laughable. He was everything in one, not always great, but always great TV. More important, he was coast to coast.

He is still a kick, still an original, only these days trying to survive hosting a “nice little local show” in Los Angeles. His assignment? Keep KABC-TV competitive at 3 p.m. (with repeats at 12:30 a.m.) and provide a strong lead-in for the 4 p.m. “Eyewitness News.”

His most recent record? Don’t ask.

In last week’s Nielsens (the only local ratings service used by both stations), Snyder’s average 13% audience share was doubled by Donahue.

It’s beginning to look as if afternoon time isn’t Tom time, which is unfortunate. True, there isn’t a better hour on TV than “Donahue.” After a thudding start last February, though, “Tom Snyder” has improved enormously, having settled mostly into an irreverent, smart-alecky, self-parodying mode keyed less to issues than people.

Snyder is still self-destructive, the victim of a powerful magnetic attraction between his foot and mouth.

“Sometimes I really try too hard to be funny on television, and when I try to be funny, I die. And when I try this stuff, I’ll watch the replay at night and say to myself, ‘Why do you do that? Why do you reach beyond yourself? You know you’re good at information. Why do you have to go out there and try to do jokes?’ And I keep doin’ it anyway, like the moth to the flame.”

Despite that, “Tom Snyder” is a show to like. And the host a man to like.

Dishwasher cooking (the fish was lousy, by the way) is an example. And so is his frequent mocking of TV and even the self-serving hype of Channel 7 and his own program.

He jokes about Channel 7’s “naked grab for ratings” in getting the cast of “our beloved ‘General Hospital’ ” to appear on “Tom Snyder” during the May ratings period. Why beloved? It’s the popular ABC lead-in to “Tom Snyder,” and having the cast as guests could rub off.

And here is Snyder telling viewers to watch his show: “It’s not a film, not a recording, not a videotape. It’s big. It’s live. It’s on sevehhhhhn! “

But for how long?

“Tom Snyder” started as a four-week trial in place of Channel 7’s anemic “Three Three O,” got renewed through May, and “it’s my understanding that we’ve now been renewed, period ,” Snyder said.

Renewed, comma .

Although Channel 7 is mum, speculation abounds that Snyder will be replaced in September by a newly syndicated talk series hosted by Oprah Winfrey, the Chicago talk-show host who was nominated for an Academy Award for her work in “The Color Purple.” Channel 7 has bought her show.

Snyder, who says his Channel 7 contract runs another year, coolly brings up Winfrey without being asked. “We are sort of in limbo,” he said, “but we are proceeding under the assumption that we will be on the air until further notice.”

The divorced Snyder has a 21-year-old daughter living in Los Angeles. He returned here seeking work after a stormy two years at New York’s WABC-TV, where he began as solo anchor for the 11 p.m. news and finished on the less prestigious 5 p.m. newscast. When his contract expired, he left by mutual consent, prompted by his soft ratings, bad relations with general manager Bill Fyffe and dislike of New York.

“I really got tired of New York. People live under great frustration there. They are ripped off every time they step out the door. The subways stink. Every bridge you go across costs you a dollar. The streets are deplorable. People live on top of each other. The weather is inclement. It’s a hassle to get to work in the snow. The city has its own income tax. I mean, it extracts every last ounce of patience from working people.”

New York didn’t exactly swoon over Tom Snyder either.

“Maybe I bankrupted myself there,” he said. “I really got bad notices. And there was the ad campaign when I started. I swear to God, there was this bunch of subway posters, my face with lights behind it, with the words: ‘He’s controversial, he’s arrogant, he’s caustic, he’s emotional, he’s overbearing, he’s New York.’ Not only did we tell everybody in New York that I was a jerk, but we told everybody in New York that they were jerks too.”

It also didn’t help when WABC suspended Snyder for a week without pay in 1983 for giving a stagehand the old middle-finger salute on the air. “I got mad over some stupid little thing and I thought we were off the air,” Snyder said. “I mean Nelson Rockefeller threw ‘the bird’ to the Republican National Convention and he didn’t get suspended, right? And Jets quarterback Richard Todd threw ‘the bird’ to 65,000 people, and did they suspend him? No.”

Why, Snyder wonders, is he always the target?

“I have no idea. I honest to God don’t know. I mean, I was watching a football telecast one day and they were talking about how a player whose last name was Frank kept a diary. And the announcer said, ‘This guy keeps a diary the way Anne Frank kept a diary.’ And I said to myself, ‘Oh, my God, that was an analogy not to draw.’ And not a word was written about it. I mean, if I said it or Cosell said it, I mean, we’re out, we’re gone.”

Snyder’s affection for the print press roughly parallels his feeling for New York. Before signing with ABC, he had “meaningful conversations” about returning to Channel 4, where he was a top anchorman in the early 1970s. “But I thought, if for some reason or another, I didn’t get a 20 rating when I get out of the box, everyone would write in bold headlines, ‘He’s back and he’s bombed!’ I didn’t want that.”

Time to reflect: “Listen, I suppose I bring a lot of negatives to television. And we went on the air in Los Angeles with a lot of fanfare. We bought all the ads in TV Guide and the radio spots, and we came on the air and the show was boring.”

Time to attack: “But you know what kills me? We went on the first week, and the newspapers wrote, ‘Well, the ratings are in and he’ll be off the air in three weeks.’ And now, here we are in June, and nobody ever says, ‘Hey, remember way back when we said it wasn’t going to last? Son-of-a-gun, not that he’s now king of the world. But here’s this guy who came on with a show put together with baling wire, a tiny staff and a low budget and they got off to a rocky start. But son-of-a-gun, they lasted this long, and maybe by some strange quirk of fate, maybe by some miracle, it’s gonna last. Maybe he can do it.’ ”

Big. Live. On sevehhhhhn!