“Full Metal Jousting” 10 p.m. Sunday, History

Television shows will do almost anything to generate publicity, but it would not be correct to say that the people at the History channel locked me in this suffocating metal container until I agreed to write something about their new series. I actually asked them to lock me in here.

That was about 10 minutes ago. Seemed like a good idea at the time. Now, though, I’m thinking better of it. When I can think at all. Which I can do only intermittently on account of the oxygen deprivation.

The series “Full Metal Jousting” has its premiere Sunday night, and it features the real thing, not the fake theatrical jousting you see at Renaissance fairs. Guys on horseback charge at each other with 11-foot wooden lances. They’re wearing armor. Which is how I came to be sealed up in this sartorial sardine can.

We’re in a press room at Madison Square Garden in New York, where Shane Adams, the show’s genial ringmaster and a champion jouster himself, has arranged to put on a demonstration at halftime during a bull-riding event. And while waiting his turn in front of the crowd, he has agreed to let me try on a suit of the armor being used in the show.

I was not expecting quite so tight a fit. Or the weight. Or the de facto blindness. Or the sensation of being baked alive.

It was a balmy 72 degrees when a squire — or “ground crew,” his title nowadays — crammed me into this gear. (No way you’ll ever get it on by yourself.) At the five-minute mark the temperature hit what seemed like 200, and now, at 10 minutes, it’s 350, the roasting point for a turkey. Hmm; perhaps that is no coincidence.

In any case, as I slowly achieve a golden succulence, I am more impressed with each passing minute at this whole jousting thing, which I mocked in print a few months ago when another jousting show, “Knights of Mayhem,” turned up on the National Geographic Channel. Earlier in the visit Adams had explained that a joust was not merely two guys flailing randomly at each other with lances.

The sport has rules and scoring and technique, and now that I’m in this suit of armor, I can tell you that anyone who can mount a horse while wearing this stuff, much less accomplish what a jouster is trying to accomplish, is a skilled athlete. Crazy, to be sure, but skilled.

The jouster is trying to hit his opponent not just in any old place but on a spot “not much bigger than a license plate,” as Adams says in the show’s premiere: a so-called grand guard bolted to the left side of the opponent’s chest. This seems preposterous, given that both jousters are on galloping horses and that, with this armor on, you can barely see.

That’s because the helmet’s visor has slits that provide roughly the field of vision you get when looking straight into the noonday sun and squinting. There’s a reason for this.

“If that lance came in and struck in that visor area, and the lance could go through, you would be another King Henry II of France,” Adams explains (at least I think that’s who it is — can’t really see) as I’m getting used to this near sightlessness. Henry died in a jousting accident in 1559, which is why you’ll seldom see kings jousting today.

If you watch “Full Metal Jousting,” however, you will see some relatively ordinary guys giving it a try. The gimmick of the show is that Adams and his lieutenants take 16 men who have not jousted competitively before and teach them the sport. Through elimination bouts the series will build to the crowning of a champion.