CALL ME AN old stick in the soggy soil, but somehow I just cannot get excited about the prospect of winning a seat atop several thousand tons of liquid dynamite equivalent to go chasing stomach upset across the wild blue yonder.

The subject of discussion here is TV game shows. Ever since I won $4.50 for answering "Benjamin Franklin" to a question on WROL radio's "Armchair Detective" quiz show in Knoxville, Tennessee, somewhere back near the beginning of time, I've been an addict of competitions via the airwaves.

Came television, and there was "Jeopardy" and "The Price Is Right," and in Britain something called "Supermarket Sweepstake," in which you chase around a store like a fruit bat on speed, loading everything you can lay hands on into a shopping trolley, all yours to keep - in the minute or so the cheap buggers give you to do it in.

I've never been on these or any other TV game shows, but as a confirmed couch potato I find watching them a marvelous way to go daydreaming between cleaning out the cat litter trays, gluing wonky wheels back on footstools and pondering the latest advances in slug repellant technology.

(There's a polecat-like aroma of greed about all this, of course, and it can turn the human brain into parakeet poo. Witness a new game show bought by Britain's Channel 5, called "Touching the Truck." It involves contestants trying to keep their hands on a $75,000 truck to win it.)

But for me, the daydreaming may be about to click on the nightmare channel. I'm told that the British Broadcasting Corp., that one-time epitome of all things sane, is about to buy a game show that will send winning contestants into space.

It's called "The Great Space Adventure," and it will, as one bit of media bilge puts it, "see 500 competitors per round fighting for a place on one of the first commercial flights, soaring 70 miles into space and weightlessness."

In other words, the winner gets a chance, roundabouts the year 2004, to sit atop an overgrown Roman candle and let others safely attached to earth propel him or her to a place where there's no air to breathe, no "up" or "down" and a good chance of turning into a bucket of ashes if the return leg goes ever so slightly wrong.

About midway through, the contestant may well ponder the wisdom of even turning on the TV that night - and to contemplate whether second prize might have been two rocket rides into space, thus thanking his/her stars for at least one bit of good fortune before charcoal time looms.

All this comes to mind because I spent seven years covering the U.S. space program at Cape Canaveral and the Houston Manned Spacecraft Center (as was), and what I learned was that as fun goes, flying into space seemed on a par with extracting my own wisdom teeth, sticking my arm up a cow's butt or remarrying my first wife, whichever came first.

The unofficial motto of space folk was (and may still be), "Ad astra, per aspera." That translates as "To the stars, through hardship." (Wernher von Braun's motto was said to be, "I aim for the stars, but sometimes I hit London," but that's another subject.)

Anyway, the contestant who wins "The Great Space Adventure" had best pay heed to that "hardship" bit, because they seriously mean it. I went through bits and pieces of the astronaut training program and found it only slightly less entertaining than triple-bypass heart surgery.

I climbed aboard fighter jets to experience the thrill of "G" forces. When the plane pulls sharply out of a dive, the pressure suddenly forces your stomach to nuzzle up to your spinal column in a fashion that would be frowned upon in a court of law. "G" (gravity) forces can send a 175-pound man's weight to 700 pounds or worse.

Then there was the day I went up to Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio to go weightless flying with Buzz Aldrin and a couple of other astronauts aboard a KC-130 - actually a Boeing 707 fashioned into a tube with padding. It wasn't known as the "vomit comet" for nothing.

The pilots first put the KC-130 into a steep dive, then pulled up steeply - a maneuver that left us guinea pigs pinned to the floor under three "G's" - three times the force of gravity. Then as the plane slowed, they sent it rolling into a dive that lifted us into zero-gravity, or "Zero-G."

For about 30 seconds or so, we floated around weightless, floating pens and notepads and cameras to each other like so many slow-moving basketballs. I must admit that for the first few "Zero-G" parabolas, it was good fun - like floating in a swimming pool without all that annoying water.

But after 29 of these "down-up-and-overs," I was heartily delighted that I had heeded the tip about eating a very light breakfast and was trying desperately not to think about pancakes and bacon and maple syrup...

(A couple of days before, a navigator new to the "Zero-G" run had interpreted "light" breakfast to mean four fried eggs, bacon, hash browns, toast and coffee, but hold the grapefruit juice. At the top of the first climb into weightlessness, his stomach paid the price and the resulting mess floated slowly toward the plane's windshield.

(The pilot, spotting this out of the corner of his eye, deftly goosed the throttle - just enough to send the beleaguered navigator surging forward to catch up with his own barf, face first.)

These events have nagged in my memory over the years. In the mid-1980s, NASA invited civilian journalists to apply for a ride on a future orbital mission, and I duly filled in the application forms. And I remembered my stomach making unwanted passes at my backbone, and the KC-130 navigator.

I poured myself a large whisky, pondered life's little realities for a few minutes, then took the thick envelope with the application and dumped it into the waste bin, about 12 hours before the deadline. I sat back, relaxed, and pondered the restorative value of scotch when it comes to common sense.

"The Great Space Adventure" TV game show will go on without me. My sole contribution will be to send the "winner" a barf bag (unused) that I kept as a souvenir of my last flight aboard Pan-Am Flight 002.

Thought for the Week: We are all born naked, wet and hungry. Then things get worse.

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