ABC will be trying something new in...

ABC will be trying something new in late-night programming this summer. Starting June 1, it will follow “Nightline” on Mondays at midnight with “Monday Sportsnite,” an hourlong program that will present what the network describes as “a wide variety of lighthearted and issue-oriented sports features.” Al Trautwig will be the host.

Angela Lansbury has been tapped to host this year’s Tony Awards, which will be held in New York June 7. CBS will televise the event. Lansbury, the star of CBS’ “Murder, She Wrote,” is a four-time Tony winner.

Hayley Mills is making a pilot for NBC. She’s starring in a comedy called “What Now, Mrs. Davis?” The former Disney star (“Pollyanna,” “The Parent Trap”) is cast as a sixth-grade teacher who constantly gets involved in her students’ lives.

Home Box Office is readying a TV drama called “The Chicago Conspiracy Trial,” based on the famous 1969 trial in which Tom Hayden, Abbie Hoffman, Jerry Rubin, Bobby Seale and four others were accused of conspiring to disrupt the previous year’s Democratic National Convention in Chicago. The cast will include Peter Boyle, Elliott Gould, Martin Sheen, Robert Carradine, Michael Lembeck, Carl Lumbly, Robert Loggia and Barry Miller. Its first telecast date will be May 16.

A 1946 escape attempt at Alcatraz Prison is the subject of “Six Against the Rock,” a TV movie that NBC plans to broadcast May 18. Playing the convicts who attempt to break out are David Carradine, Charles Haid, Howard Hesseman, David Morse, Jan-Michael Vincent and Paul Sanchez. Richard Dysart of “L.A. Law” portrays the warden who calls in the U.S. Marines to thwart them.

Leaf Phoenix plays a 13-year-old boy who thinks his father (David Rasche) may have committed a murder in “No Secrets,” a TV movie that’s being produced on Catalina for CBS. Paul LeMat co-stars as a drifter who befriends Phoenix and another youngster, played by Kelly Martin.

Fans of public television’s “Mystery!” series will see some familiar sleuths in next season’s shows. Leo McKern will return in six new episodes of “Rumpole of the Bailey,” and there will be 10 episodes of “Lord Peter Wimsey,” with Edward Petherbridge in the title role. There also will be new episodes featuring Agatha Christie’s Miss Marple character.

Shirley Lauro’s play “Open Admissions” is being turned into a movie for CBS. It will star Jane Alexander as a troubled speech professor, Dennis Farina as her husband and Michael Beach as a failing student who reawakens in her the feeling of what it is to teach.

In production for airing on public television next year is “Voices & Visions,” a 13-part series about poetry. The series also will form the core of a college-level telecourse. Among the poets whose work will be discussed are Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, T. S. Eliot, Robert Frost, Sylvia Plath, Wallace Stevens and Langston Hughes.