Arts and entertainment reports from The Times, national and international news services and the nation’s press.

TELEVISION

A New Comedy?: Bill Cosby is planning his next TV venture, a half-hour comedy in which he would star as an out-of-work man dealing with life’s frustrations. Cosby has reunited with Carsey-Werner, the team that produced his successful 1980s sitcom “The Cosby Show,” to develop the series, to be based loosely on the British comedy series “One Foot in the Grave.” Carsey-Werner also produces the current TV hits “Roseanne,” “Grace Under Fire” and “Cybill.” In describing the proposed series, which has not yet been offered to the networks, Carsey-Werner partner Tom Werner said: “We believe this new character has stories all of us can relate to, and who better to tell those stories than Bill Cosby, one of the world’s best storytellers.”

POP/ROCK

Ono-McCartney Reconciliation Tape: In commemoration of the 50-year anniversary of the first atomic bomb being dropped on Hiroshima, Yoko Ono is letting Japanese fans hear the result of her recent reconciliation with Paul McCartney. On Sunday morning, Japan’s public television station NHK will broadcast a song about Hiroshima that Ono wrote and recorded with backup by McCartney and his family. In January, 25 years after their rift began, Paul and Linda McCartney invited Ono and her son, Sean Lennon, to visit the McCartneys’ home outside London. McCartney proposed the recording session, said NHK officials. Ono suggested her song “Hiroshima Sky Is Always Blue.” They recorded it in a single take. Ono sang and Paul played stand-up bass, while Linda, Sean and the McCartney children played backup instruments. Ono hasn’t said whether she will give the song wider release. . . . Meanwhile, Al Jarreau and soprano Katia Ricciarelli are among the singers who will join the Vatican in marking the 50th anniversary of the bomb at a “Concert for Peace” being held in the Vatican’s Paul VI auditorium today.

RADIO

Plug Pulled: “Sunday Morning Live,” a weekly community affairs talk show on KACE-FM (103.9), has been replaced by “Turning Point Live,” a newsmagazine hosted by Kay Hixson and Patricia Means, publishers of the black magazine Turning Point. KACE general manager Howard Neal said that “Sunday Morning Live” co-hosts Isidra Person-Lynn, who started the show in 1986, and Mark Whitlock were dismissed because the station’s new owners wanted a fresh start. The new show is supposed to feature more in-studio interviews and a faster-paced presentation, Neal said.

MOVIES

Early Oscar Talk: Although the next Oscar show won’t take place until the spring, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences this week invited 67 countries to submit their entries for the 1995 foreign-language film award. Academy officials are starting early so they can fit all of the submissions into a screening schedule, which will begin in December. Entries are due Nov. 1, and the nominations will be announced Feb. 13. . . . Meanwhile, director Arthur Hiller, who was nominated for an Oscar in 1970 for “Love Story,” has been unanimously elected for his third one-year term as the academy’s president.

ART

Back to the Original: Microsoft Corp. Chairman Bill Gates, who last year purchased the only manuscript by Leonardo da Vinci in the United States, has announced that he will remove Armand Hammer’s name from the sheaf of 18 handwritten pages and restore the title by which it had been known in scholarly circles for nearly 250 years. Called the Leicester Codex, the manuscript had been passed down in the family of the Earl of Leicester (1698-1759) until being acquired by Hammer, the late Occidental Petroleum chairman, at a 1980 London auction. Hammer had angered many scholars by renaming the codex after himself. It was sold to Gates by the UCLA/Armand Hammer Museum of Art at a controversial auction last November for $30.8 million.

PEOPLE WATCH

Tiny Tim Turning Traditional?: The long-haired ukulele player with the falsetto voice is preparing for his third marriage, and the man whose previous nuptials took place in such bizarre settings as a national television show and a horror theme park is getting married in an unexpected place this time--a Minneapolis church. Tiny Tim, 63, plans to wed Susan Marie Garner, 39, on Aug. 18. “Marriage has always been sacred to me. I hope this one works,” said Tim, who married his first wife, Miss Vicki, on NBC’s “Tonight Show” in 1969, and renewed his wedding vows to second wife, Miss Jan, at a horror theme park last Halloween in an event also aired on “The Tonight Show.” Tim and Miss Jan divorced in June.

QUICK TAKES

KNBC-TV Channel 4 news anchor Paul Moyer, who underwent quadruple bypass surgery June 17, will return to his 5 p.m. co-anchor position Monday. He is expected to resume the same duties on the 11 p.m. newscast and on the 7:30 p.m. “O.J. Simpson: The Trial” series shortly thereafter. . . . Carol Lin has left her post as weekend anchor at KTTV-TV Channel 11 to join ABC News as a correspondent. Rotating substitute anchors will take over Lin’s position at KTTV until a permanent replacement is named.