The best thing happened last night.

We were at Dad's for a family dinner, and turned up early due to the wonders of Melbourne public transport.

While we were all waiting for the food to cook, Dad exclaimed "Ooh, it's Lily time" and sat down on the couch.

Reader: this was the first time I have ever watched Letters & Numbers.

I realise that this admission puts my already shaky rep as a TV "expert" into question, but there's a reason for this. My stupid block of flats has no SBS reception. Indeed, the TV reception in general (even with a digital set-top box) is so bad I'm beginning to wonder if the aerial isn't actually the busted antenna from Bill & Ted, complete with globs of bubblegum and pudding cans.

As proof, I offer this spectacular passive aggressive note from the mail room:



Unfortunately I don't even get ghost imagining - I get nuffin'.

So, "Lily time" was the first time I'd ever managed to catch SBS' endearingly daft Letters & Numbers, and despite being a VERY late guest of this particular TV party, I am hooked.

I've written before about my love of low-key television (The New Inventors, The Collectors et al), and with ABC giving the boot to most of their daggiest shows, it falls to SBS to pick up the slack.

Having no prior concept of what the show's content or mood was like, I was convinced the whole thing was expert satire: from the toothy, dorky contestants to host Richard Morecroft's ultimate "TV guy" tone, to the grand prize (a dictionary!) to the set, the whole thing could have been dreamed up by Micallef and you wouldn't have blinked.

It is real, however, and bizarrely compelling.

Shamefully, I was never good at maths, and yet something about Richard and Lily had maths SPEWING from my mouth last night; it was like I'd turned into Russell Crowe in A Beautiful Mind. "Fifty times ten! Plus seventy-five! Minus six times two!!" I was barking, desperate to get it right so that Lily might smile on me through the magic of television.

(I got one right; haha suck on that Mrs Mohandoss, you gave me a D+ for Maths, YOU WERE CLEARLY WRONG!!!!)

Of course now that I'm a card-carrying fan of the show, I have gone back over its more "entertaining" groups of letters...



...But despite these guffaw-snigger moments, the enduring beauty of a show like Letters & Numbers is how utterly, utterly daggy it is.

(I'd also like to big up Lily, a great TV role-model for young girls if ever I saw one: university smarts and a killer collection of frocks. And not afraid of a penisdump.)

Its complete lack of bells and whistles lulls you into a maths and spelling-inspired reverie. And as someone who used to have a near-phobic response to reciting the times tables, that's no small feat. Thank you, Letters & Numbers, for healing me.