Australia's Celebrity Version of 'Letters and Numbers' Is Returning for a Second Season in March

So far, 2022 has been the year of Wordle — of waking up, busting out your best five-letter guesses over your morning coffee, bragging about your prowess online, getting annoyed about American spelling and grumbling about changes since The New York Times took over the popular game, too. But come March, it'll also be the year of Celebrity Letters and Numbers for the second year running, because SBS is bringing back the star-studded version of its initial 2010–12 hit that first debuted last year.

Whether you watched along back when famous folks weren't doing the puzzling, you've been hooked to repeats of old episodes over the past ten years or you jumped onboard when Celebrity Letters and Numbers premiered in 2021, there's no denying the joys of this simple but delightful game show. It celebrates clever contestants doing word and number brain-teasers, each episode has an engagingly low-key vibe — all while still remaining tense as competitors try to work out the right answers, of course — and it's very easy and immensely enjoyable to play along with from home. Accordingly, it's no wonder that SBS has made a second season of its new starry format, which'll start airing on SBS and via SBS On Demand from Saturday, March 5.

Comedian Michael Hing is still on hosting duties, after taking over from the OG version's Richard Morecroft. Lily Serna is also returning to flip numbers and show off her maths skills, while David Astle will again tell contestants whether they've found real words or just made them up, all with his trusty dictionary in hand — as they've both done since before Letters and Numbers had an extra word at the beginning of its moniker.

As happened during season one of Celebrity Letters and Numbers, they'll be joined by three different well-known faces and a special guest each week, some vying for glory and others sitting with Astle in dictionary corner — with season two set to feature Merrick Watts, Ben Law, Tanya Hennessy, Akmal Saleh, Susie Youssef and Aaron Chen, among others. And, this new run of episodes will again span an hour each, and feature 12 instalments.

Making words out of nine randomly selected letters, using six also randomly chosen numbers in equations to reach a set figure, and rearranging a jumble of nine more letters into one lengthy word in the final round — that's still all on the bill, naturally, because it wouldn't be any version of Letters and Numbers otherwise.

And yes, to answer the obvious question: this is basically SBS's Aussie version of the great 8 Out of 10 Cats Does Countdown (which SBS also airs, so it clearly knows that it's ace). Letters and Numbers, both with and without celebs, owes a big debt to a few European shows, in fact. When it first aired sans comedians more than a decade ago, the original Letters and Numbers took its cues from both French TV's Des chiffres et des lettres, which dates back to 1965 — and also from Britain's Countdown, which has been on the air since 1982, and then inspired 8 Out of 10 Cats Does Countdown.

Check out the trailer for season two of Celebrity Letters and Numbers below:

The second season of Celebrity Letters and Numbers will start airing on SBS and via SBS On Demand from Saturday, March 5, with new episodes dropping weekly.