THE THING IS, I'd make a very good millionaire, and the financially appealing quiz shows that abound ever more frequently on television these days, would seem the ideal way of getting to be one at speed and without all that work nonsense. And I am good at quizzes.

What I am not so good at, alas, are quiz shows. Which presents something of a problem in this particular grand scheme of things.

Now it's true that I can answer all sorts of esoteric questions until the cows come home, don their slippers, grab a couch and tune in on "Who Wants To Be a Millionaire?" In fact, someone once described me as a "veritable walking garbage dump of trivia."

That is, I can come up with most of the answers, until asked to do so in public. Then the cat gets my tongue and makes a furious dash with it to the depths of the Carlsbad Caverns. I am left behind, totally bereft of a reply to the question: "Who's buried in Grant's Tomb?"

All of this came clear in my awareness as I pondered the latest gas bill (are we somehow powering up Buckingham Palace?), the TV license fee (in this country, you don't get drivel for free) and the price of cat food and cat litter (we pay to put it in one end and take it out the other, to get the purrs in between).

In despair to distance myself from this Everestian mountain of debt, I flicked on the tube, thinking to catch the movie "Scrooge." There's a man, I thought, who knew the value of money. You don't save much by wasting it on coal to warm the help, for instance.

(Then again, Ebenezer didn't have a wife whose favorite saying is, "you get what you pay for," or three cats who disdain canned food as fodder fit only for the hoi polloi of the meow-meow set and opt instead for minced beef, prawns and pate de fois gras. I jest not.)

But I digress. Instead of "Scrooge," it was a repeat of one of the more satisfying - and frustrating - programs in British TV history, the one where the lady with the plummy accent became the first contestant to win one million pounds. That's just short of a million and a half in American.

Satisfying because of how easy the million-pound question was: "To whom was Elizabeth of Aquitaine married?" (The answer, of course, was King Henry II. Anyone who has ever seen the movie "The Lion in Winter" or was forced to explain the tribulations of Thomas a Becket in Mrs. Wiles's English class at Central High in Fountain City, Tennessee, would breeze that one.)

But equally frustrating because, had I been sitting in the contestant's chair facing a quizmaster who trained for the Spanish Inquisition and an audience descended from the lot who cheered on the lions in the Roman Coliseum, an alien from the fifth planet of Betelgeuse would have used his laser-powered vacuum to suck my brain dry on the spot.

So has it always been. I think this is a form of trauma stemming from my first public quiz outing, the finals of a spelling bee at Oakwood Elementary in Knoxville, to choose a candidate for the next round of a national spelling competition. It was only myself and Ted Simpson left, and I went out on the word "rendezvous."

Now what kind of word is "rendezvous" to spring on a fourth-grade kid who grew up on the Tennessee Barn Dance and Wally Fowler and the Smoky Mountain Boys, and to whom France and all things French might as well belong to the planet Zog? So I spelled it like it sounded - rondevoo.

A bas les frogs. May the Eiffel Tower develop rust fistulas and their wine turn into Listerine.

The next year wasn't much better. This time I reached the final at Lincoln Park Elementary, only to become one of the earliest victims of our consumer society. I was asked to spell "biscuit," by which time I'd seen about a million of the bloody things. I spelled it "Bisquick."

I decided to seek fame and fortune - or at least the nylon hose that were on offer and I thought to win for my mother, this being at the end of World War II - on the Lowell Blanchard afternoon radio quiz show on WNOX, 990 on your dial in Knoxville.

In the secure confines of my armchair at home, I had already answered about two zillion of Blanchard's questions, so it was in a gesture of supreme confidence that I sprung to my feet in the radio studio audience even before the question was posed: "How many varieties of fish are there in the world."

The cat suddenly appeared, then disappeared in the general direction of Carlsbad, and what was left of my tongue blurted out my answer: "Tuh-two." The answer was 2,000. I was tempted to ask who did the counting and when, but decided not to push my bad luck and spent the next 45 minutes cringing ever lower in my seat, envying the cockroaches scuttling about in their anonymity on the floor.

Not a lot has changed in the ensuing decades. Two or three years back, I auditioned for a British TV quiz show, "Fifteen-to-One," fell on a question about what a female breeding cat was called (it's a queen, as I've known for 49 years, but outside the studio).

I received a postcard from the "Fifteen-to-One" folks a few days later, telling me not to bother applying as a contestant for at least another 10 years. By that time they should be able to carve the epitaph "the silly bugger didn't know" on my gravestone.

And now "Who Wants to be a Millionaire?" has reared its quizzical head. Each series, I telephone in, answering the question that makes me eligible for the pool of possible contestants. Then I spend days waiting for a call to come onto the show - and dreading each ring of the phone.

Because I know that if I get on this quiz show, I'll have, as I have had so often in the past, a companion. The Carlsbad cat.

Thought for the Week: There are three kinds of people - those who can count and those who can't.

"Notes From A Tangled Webb" is syndicated by: