THE PEEP SHOW HEATS UP ON NATIONAL TELEVISION

More TV juice.

It’s been another one of those weeks. Tammy Faye Bakker is talking. Oliver North isn’t talking. Donna Rice has talked--but only to Bah Bah on ABC’s “20/20.”

Vanna has also talked, and so has Fawn Hall, but Jessica Hahn hasn’t. Hahn is the former church secretary with whom defrocked TV evangelist Jim Bakker has admitted having a sexual encounter.

And speaking of sexual encounters . . . .

“Did you share a room, did you sleep with Gary Hart?” Barbara Walters asked Rice on “20/20” Thursday.

Rice’s reply: “I don’t want to answer you. The reason is because it’s a question of dignity. Whether I did, whether I didn’t with Gary Hart or anybody else, I wouldn’t answer it one way or the other.” Unfortunately, Walters didn’t press the issue.

(The quotes come from a complete transcript furnished by ABC prior to the show.)

Rice has been a hot media ticket since her publicized involvement with Hart, who dropped out of the presidential race last month. Both denied any impropriety after a Miami Herald story reporting that Rice had spent a night at Hart’s Washington, D.C., townhouse while his wife, Lee, was out of town. However, the National Enquirer later published pictures of Rice sitting on Hart’s lap during a yacht trip to Bimini, pictures supposedly sold to the tabloid by Rice’s former friend, Lynn Armandt.

Steam heat.

Yet there was nothing on “20/20” Thursday to match the week’s near-comic intensity of the ongoing PTL scorcher or the political electricity of the Iran- contra saga. The most intriguing part of the interview was unrelated to sex, but concerned Rice’s feeling that she had been set up by Armandt. “It certainly seems that way,” she said.

When it came to rip-roaring theater, “20/20” took a back seat to Tammy Faye Bakker. Not content with her recent coming out with Jim on “Nightline,” she has been all over TV, wringing her hands, sobbing and vowing that the couple won’t let the PTL ministry’s new management evict them from their lavish lakefront parsonage. Shopping at K mart is one thing, but a girl’s gotta draw the line somewhere. Besides, Tammy Faye revealed to the camera that she and Jim are down to their last 37,000-- dollars , not tears.

Almost simultaneously, the mysterious and controversial North broke tradition by refusing to be questioned privately in advance of his scheduled public testimony in the Iran-contra hearings. Hall, his former secretary, testified earlier this month about her role in the political scandal.

TV is starting to resemble Dial-a-Scandal. Thanks to Hart, this has been a season where politics and sex are interchangeable. The Rice/Walters interview brings Hart closer to full cycle, a story in which a newspaper, the Herald, was the major catalyst. As usual, though, TV provided the drum roll.

First came pictures of Hart the Confident, far ahead in the early campaign for the Democratic nomination for President. Then came Hart the Wounded, a self-righteous, self-proclaimed media victim, rejecting strong suggestions that he was stepping out on his wife and having a tryst with Rice. Then came Hart the Indignant, refusing to answer a reporter’s point-blank question about whether he’d ever committed adultery. Then came Hart the Defeated, withdrawing from the race with a loud, paranoic blast at the press amid further rumors of his alleged womanizing.

All of this was followed by a continuing debate about whether a candidate’s private life should be fair game for media scrutiny.

Rice herself is now fair game. “You know, there’s the big question of . . . invasion of privacy of a public figure,” Rice told Waters. “But I have not heard anybody talk about the invasion of privacy of a private person who did not voluntarily . . . into the public arena . . . And that makes me angry. I don’t think the media has a right to make a private person a public person.”

But as Walters noted, as soon as Rice began seeing Hart she made herself a public figure.

ABC says that “20/20” got the Rice interview only after repeated queries from Walters, and that Rice was paid nothing for the interview.

Meanwhile, TV art and reality blur.

Coming Thursday on KCET is “First Among Equals,” a British miniseries about four members of Parliament, one of whom is blackmailed over a sexual dalliance. It’s based on a novel by Jeffrey Archer, whose own British political career was scuttled by a sex scandal last year.

And on June 28, George C. Scott, as President Sam Tresch in the Fox series “Mr. President,” rips into his son-in-law, Fred Hayes, for committing adultery, which the Chief Executive has learned about from an FBI report. It seems that Fred is planning to take his girlfriend to Bermuda (not Bimini), and the President is worried about the media finding out. They won’t.

Unless Fred’s girlfriend tells all on “20/20.”