Picture this: a twin sister and brother, facing off in an epic duel. The winner to scoop up television glory, the loser forced to taste crushing, public defeat. But this is a prime-time, family-friendly battle: no swords allowed. Words are their weapon of choice.

That is how last Tuesday’s episode of The Great Australian Spelling Bee rolled out, with eight-year-old Harpita duking it out with her brother Harpith in the flashcard round. Both reeled off their answers correctly: easel, critique, playwright, statuette. Each word was written in nearly identical handwriting, at near identical speeds. “It’s a twin thing,” Harpita said to camera, an evil twinkle in her eye.

“Are you cheering because his was correct?” the host, Grant Denyer, asked Harpitha, after her brother held up his tablet with a correctly spelled “panorama”.

“I’m cheering because mine is the same,” Harpitha answered, gleefully holding up her tablet.

But it was the word “portraiture” that tripped the pair up – with both spelling it incorrectly. A nail-biting tiebreaker saw Harpith triumphant, although it would be his sister alone who would eventually move into finals.

From the outset a show centred on spelling hardly sounds compelling. One of my two children comes home every day from school armed with spelling lists to memorise and, trust me, there’s very little excitement about it.

And the idea of turning children’s spelling into reality television – with lingering shots of crying faces, precocious tots desperately trying (and failing) to please their helicopter parents and the inevitable cracking under the immense pressure from having every slip-up filmed before a studio audience and broadcast to the nation – sounds at best dull, at worst grotesque.

But from the first episode, I was hooked. Who could resist Karl and his bowtie, striding to the microphone like a mini Wes Anderson? Or owner of the cutest cheeks on the planet, Grace? Don’t let her doll-like appearance fool you – she is a mean speller, able to reel off a string of correct spellings without breaking a sweat.

And sitting behind the judge’s table is the inscrutable Pronouncer, whose poker-faced pauses always makes the kids sweat, before revealing if their answer is correct and whether they remain “one of the top 10 spellers in Australia”.

While it’s easy to get smug when the kids trip up on some of the easier words, how would you fare in the face of words like “lithosphere”? Or “toponym”? Or “alacrity”? These kids have never heard of these words, let alone know how to spell them, but under the bright glare of the television camera muddle their way through, with varying success.

In the face of all-singing (The X Factor, The Voice), all-modelling (Australia’s Next Top Model) and all-dancing (Dancing with the Stars) reality shows, The Great Australian Spelling Bee is a very different beast. It champions the pint-sized readers, writers and geeks of the world, celebrating their braininess when few competition shows do.

And with a second season announced by Ten, next year represents another opportunity to coax kids hiding out in the library back into the television spotlight.

• The final episode of The Great Australian Spelling Bee airs on 8 September at 7.30pm on Ten