An Eclectic Festival of Quirky, Classic TV : Broadcasting: A salute to Sid Caesar Wednesday will open the Museum of Television & Radio’s 11th annual event, which mixes classics with curiosities.

Ten years ago this spring, a New York museum came West with a collection of classic TV programs and gave Los Angeles what soon became an annual festival of note for couch potatoes and students of the medium.

At the beginning, the Manhattan-based Museum of Broadcasting--now called the Museum of Television & Radio--was on somewhat uncertain ground with its Los Angeles expedition. Its first venture, in 1984, set up shop at the ABC Entertainment Center. Its second, in 1985, welcomed intrigued fans in a studio on the Universal lot.

Finally, however, the museum forged a key link with the Los Angeles County Museum of Art--an easily accessible and prestigious institution that, ever since, has been home for the screenings and public seminars of shows and individuals that have helped make television the cultural force that it is.

When the 11th Television Festival gets under way on Wednesday with a salute to Sid Caesar, it will reflect the pattern that the Museum of Television & Radio has established in recent years--a mix of the classic, the grand, the experimental and the simply popular, with a few curios thrown in.

With the past success of screenings and seminars that celebrated such new and promising series as “Moonlighting,” “thirtysomething,” “The Simpsons” and “Twin Peaks,” the museum this year is, for instance, devoting its March 16 presentation to Steven Bochco’s “NYPD Blue,” a cop show that has survived fire for its violence and sexual material.

The museum is also turning over next Saturday night to another freshman entry, “Lois & Clark: The New Adventures of Superman,” which likewise has received critical praise although struggling in the ratings.

But despite the inclusion of several other relatively new series--”Mad About You” on Friday and “Love & War” on March 11--the most compelling attractions invariably are the shows and individuals that, over the years, have had the time to become part of our pop history and our frames of reference.

Caesar, for instance, has been honored before by the museum--starting with that very first festival--yet he is an endless source of wonder as a comic genius, and his importance to American entertainment of any kind cannot be overstated.

Then there are several series of the past that rank with the finest TV programs ever made--the newspaper drama “Lou Grant,” which is saluted on Thursday, and the ensemble cop comedy “Barney Miller,” which gets its tribute on March 9.

The upcoming festival is nothing if not eclectic.

Example: Two of television’s top-rated series, “Roseanne” and “Home Improvement,” will be showcased. “Roseanne,” which has won increasing respect as a series, has its night March 12, with star Roseanne Arnold scheduled to head the program’s contingent. “Home Improvement,” with star Tim Allen and other performers and creators of the hit, is set for March 17.

Example: “Dallas,” which is light-years from “NYPD Blue” as drama, is on the bill for next Saturday. The most dominant prime-time soap opera in TV history, it ran from 1978-91 and, along with “Dynasty,” was perhaps the medium’s most flamboyant reflection of the greedy ‘80s.

Example: “An Evening With Norman Lear,” who has previously appeared in the museum’s TV festival, will have the veteran producer and co-creator of “All in the Family” doing a solo presentation March 19, the final night of the 2 1/2-week event.

Example: “Special Bulletin,” a compelling one-shot drama about a group of anti-nuclear terrorists--which ingeniously used a TV newscast to report its developments, thus adding a prescient and dark humor about media coverage--is set for March 10. The executive producer, Don Ohlmeyer, now heads NBC’s West Coast operations. The creators, Edward Zwick and Marshall Herskovitz, later brought forth “thirtysomething.”

Amid this potpourri of television endeavors are several curios, the most notable of which is “77 Sunset Strip,” scheduled for a March 11 session.

Hardly to be confused with the “Hallmark Hall of Fame,” this lighthearted detective show that ran from the late ‘50s to the early ‘60s was one of the counter-programming weapons that the then-fledgling ABC network--unable to sign the veteran stars bound to CBS and NBC--used to gain a foothold in the network ratings wars.

With TV shows part of the mind food of the last several generations--as witness the film remakes of such series as “The Beverly Hillbillies” and “The Addams Family”--the museum has offered a wide range of shows from Fred Astaire’s home screen efforts to “Route 66” to “China Beach” to “Gunsmoke.”

At their best, past evenings devoted to such achievers as Caesar, Ernie Kovacs, Edward R. Murrow, Carol Burnett, Lucille Ball and Mary Tyler Moore remind us of TV’s capability for grandness. Nowadays, particularly, this grandness seems more and more remote as prime time is increasingly populated with tabloid-style reality shows. In its own way, “Special Bulletin” was a warning of what was ahead.

Perhaps that is why the best of what audiences see at the annual festivals become standards against which we can judge the rapid decline of network quality. When you have seen an evening with Jack Paar or Steve Allen at the festival, you sense the magic that true broadcasters--not just stars, but real broadcasters--can bring into our homes.

You can bet that the museum would give its right arm to get Johnny Carson or David Letterman for an evening each at the festival. And why not Jay Leno? How about Vin Scully on TV sports? How about an evening with Walter Cronkite? Or David Brinkley? Or Ted Koppel?

Well, that’s a start for next year. And then there’s “Frasier,” of course. And “Grace Under Fire.” And an evening with Barry Diller talking about QVC and the new electronic world would take the festival into a new dimension, the now-unfolding twilight zone where viewers will be living in the future.