A N.Y. Mecca for Media Hounds and Historians : Arts: The shiny, new Museum of Television and Radio in mid-town Manhattan may be the biggest variety show ever enclosed in a building.

It’s strange enough making a phone call in order to watch a TV program, like Sting’s pay-per-view concert. It’s stranger still having to go to a museum to watch a TV program or hear a radio show that you really want to experience.

But it’s absolutely kooky having to leave the global heart of mass-media that Los Angeles has become and travel 3,000 miles in order to get to the museum.

That is, until you get inside. The shiny, new Museum of Television and Radio in mid-town Manhattan may be the biggest variety show ever enclosed in a building. It’s so vast, so comprehensive, that it renders cable’s ethic of “consumer choice” about as retrograde as an old Philco set.

Until recently, if you wanted to sample a favorite “Lucy” or “Gunsmoke” episode, or absolutely couldn’t wait to catch a classic “Meet the Press” or “Firing Line” tete a tete , you had a few options. You could wait until it came on the air (slim chance with TV, and even slimmer with old-time radio). You could try the local video store, most of which give one-thousandth of their space to TV.

And as a last resort, there were archives.

Again, until recently, just about any archive would do. New York had the Museum of Broadcasting, sired by CBS founder William S. Paley. But since Los Angeles has been home to two of them--Pacific Pioneer Broadcasters’ Hollywood-based radio museum-library and the UCLA/Academy of Television Arts and Sciences’ archive at UCLA’s Powell Library--there was little reason to leave town.

That was until last September, when Paley’s old pet project turned into Paley’s $50-million palace: Overnight, the slim but imposing 17-story edifice housing the new museum on 52nd Street became the essential mecca of media hounds and historians.

No more hassles waiting weeks for that special tape. Or finding time for the two hours during the week when an archive is open. The new museum boasts more than 40,000 holdings, available to the public six days a week.

Architect John Burgee’s creation (with Philip Johnson as “consultant”), from its pseudo-Greco facade to its gray, staid, serious lobby, could only happen in Manhattan. This is no gateway to fun, as you’d hope from a TV and radio museum, but someone’s idea of enjambing the look of the Metropolitan Museum of Art with a Madison Avenue corporate headquarters.

The admission desk clerks are much friendlier, explaining the day’s programming in the four screening rooms and what can be found on the five floors open to the public. They’ll also tell you whether you must wait to use the library--the museum’s heart, which runs, like everything in the place (down to the gift shop’s cashier) on Apple Mackintoshes. If there’s a free Apple in the library, it’s yours for an hour (two, if you’re a member). On two weekend visits, I never had to wait.

If you do have to wait, there’s life beyond the library. In the gallery adjacent to the lobby is a nicely compact exhibit of Al Hirschfeld’s inimitable ink portraits, ranging from Lawrence Welk to the Beatles. Downstairs, in the museum’s largest theater, you can watch a comprehensive retrospective of Jack Benny’s TV shows. The Benny mini-festival--part of the museum’s yearlong survey titled “Seven Decades of Radio and Television”--continued on the fifth floor in the Ralph Guild Radio Room, where his dry, smooth-as-wine voice could be best appreciated.

Interestingly, the room was empty during both visits. A real oasis in a manic city, but another reminder of how people have lost the experience of simply sitting in a quiet place and listening.

Overwhelmingly, people come to the Museum of Television and Radio to watch. And theaters on floors above and below the library are bulging with archive material, from a TV staging of Ibsen’s “Hedda Gabler,” with Ingrid Bergman and Ralph Richardson, to a two-hour compilation of key footage from John F. Kennedy’s assassination and funeral.

For relief, I trotted off to the library in search of some classic shows. A clerk explained how to use the Apple and the mouse, and within two minutes, this Apple-illiterate user easily entered the library’s vast digitized “card catalogue.” It’s divided into three sections: the collection, the archive and highlights from the collection.

The collection is the thousands of video and radio tapes immediately available, while the archive is the museum’s entire holdings, some of which may not be available for 72 hours. A total of 400 highlights are selected by museum archivists; of course, their highlights may not be yours.

Under the nighttime serial file, for example, the highlighted shows were: two “Dynasty” episodes (the 1985 “Royal Wedding” and the finale) and the last chapter of “Peyton Place.” Did the archivists ever hear of “Who Shot J. R.?”

They know their comedy, though. The situation comedy file includes six “I Love Lucy” episodes, far outnumbering the nearest competitor. On a request slip, I listed, among others, the “Lucy” episode where she tries to get cast in an Italian movie, the classic “Gourmet Night” from “Fawlty Towers,” the last “Leave It to Beaver,” and an installment from “The Bill Cosby Show”--the original--in which Bill discovers his prejudice against short people. (A “Burns and Allen” radio show was “unavailable.”)

A desk clerk provided me with a numerical code for each show, and told me to go upstairs to a viewing room. There, I slipped into a chair at a cubicle desk, facing a small monitor complete with headphones and a panel with a 10-key pad and the same reverse, pause and fast-forward controls on any VCR remote control. Enter the number code and, presto, there’s Lucy and Ricky in Italy.

I rewound the scene where Lucy wrestles with a woman in a grape vat, slightly out of disbelief at the scene’s total abandon. A fan, or a researcher, could clearly get hooked on this place. (On the first visit, author David Halberstam was researching in the library.)

The programmers have paid attention to detail. Many tapes include the commercial breaks, which often contain more surprises than the show (a Lowenbrau spot from the late ‘70s starred then-unknown Danny Aiello). Testing the limits of the collection’s resources, I called up “The Prisoner” series, and while there were no episodes, there was something even better: “Six Into One,” a 1984 British Channel 4 production about the making of Patrick McGoohan’s eccentric epic.

There are problems, and a few quirks. When the adjacent computer crashed, a technician explained, “We’re still getting the bugs out.” About $50 million was poured into this place, and there isn’t a coat and bag check. And sometimes, you really have to wonder about the archivists’ judgment. Among the baseball section of the sports highlights file, most of the five entries feature--of course--the Yankees, including a forgettable 1978 Yankee win over the Boston Red Sox for the American League Eastern Division pennant.

Now, if this museum were in L.A. . . .