An older, grittier 'Survivor' starts tonight

They'll be eating maize instead of rice and dodging scorpions more often than spiders. Listen to the familiar New Age theme music and you will hear the voices of African children. Those are the more superficial changes viewers will notice when the CBS adventure-game megahit "Survivor" returns for a third edition at 7 tonight on Channel 5 with 16 new contestants and a new locale: a game reserve in the heart of Kenya. In contrast to the trim urban hotties of "Survivor 2," these survivors are older (many of them in their 40s), more rural and, at least in the beginning, chubbier. In the United States, they carry the mail, tend bar, herd goats and play pro soccer. In Africa, they will seek out what little shade is available, subsist on extreme lo-cal diets and try to summon the strength for competitions that "Survivor" host Jeff Probst calls "bigger and more demanding than any we've done before." The show's creator, Mark Burnett, says tonight's episode will get off to a galloping start, not unlike "Survivor 2," which opened with the turbulent arrival of a military plane on a remote Australian airstrip. "We go from zero to 60 in about one second in the first episode," Burnett promised reporters in a recent conference call. Although the broad contours of the game won't change - tribal councils every three days, for example - Probst said viewers will see new challenges and rule changes, "just to make sure the survivors don't know the direction the game will go." For most Americans tuning in tonight, this will be their first view of Kenya since news reports brought video of the 1998 terrorist bombing of the U.S. Embassy in Nairobi. That attack, like the Sept. 11 attacks on the East Coast, was linked to Osama bin Laden. The game was completed before last month's tragedy, and the beginning of U.S. retaliation. Burnett said he made no changes to the finished episodes in response to the attacks. "That did not even cross my mind," said Burnett, adding, "It's just a TV show." @ART CAPTION:Jessie Camacho (left) and Kelly Goldsmith are players in "Survivor: Africa," the third of CBS' back-to-nature contests, this one set in Kenya's Shaba National Reserve. It's scheduled to start at 7 tonight on Channel 5. @ART:Photo (color) @ART CREDIT:CBS