The 1% Club final question leaves nine contestants empty-handed as two split £95,000 jackpot
Eleven contestants reached the final question on The 1% Club, all with a chance to claim a share of a £95,000 prize pot.
But one deceptively simple sequence left nine of them out of the money.
The dramatic finish saw only Joe Clark and Liz Casey identify the correct answer, with the pair eventually taking home £47,500 each.
Eleven players faced the final challenge
The contestants had already survived a series of increasingly difficult puzzles to make it through to the final stage.
With 11 players still standing, host Lee Mack revealed that the jackpot had reached £95,000. If everyone answered the final question correctly, the money would have been divided between all 11 contestants.
Instead, the final puzzle proved far more difficult than many expected.
Lee asked:
What letter replaces the question mark in this sequence?
The sequence displayed on screen was:
YYHLY?YTRRRR
The contestants were given just 30 seconds to work out the missing letter.
As the clock counted down, they had to decide which answer they believed completed the pattern.
The answers were all over the place
When the 30 seconds were up, Lee went around the group and asked each contestant to reveal their choice.
The answers were:
H, T, E, T, R, H, N, E, L, Y, T.
There was clearly little agreement among the finalists.
Lee pointed out the wide range of answers and remarked: “There’s quite a lot of different answers there so someone might win big tonight.”
And he was right.
When the solution was finally revealed, nine of the 11 contestants had chosen incorrectly.
The missing letter was E
Lee confirmed that the correct answer was E.
The sequence was based on the last letter of each month of the year, in order.
That gives:
- January
- February
- March
- April
- May
- June
- July
- August
- September
- October
- November
- December
Put together, those final letters form:
YYHLY?YTRRRR
The missing letter was therefore E, corresponding to June.
It was a straightforward pattern once the connection was spotted, but with only 30 seconds to find it, most of the finalists failed to see it.
Joe Clark and Liz Casey win £47,500 each
Only two contestants had selected the correct answer.
Joe Clark and Liz Casey successfully solved the sequence and shared the £95,000 jackpot equally, taking £47,500 each.
For the other nine players, reaching the final question was ultimately not enough.
The result made for a particularly tense ending to the episode, with the £95,000 pot going from potentially being shared among 11 contestants to being split between just two.
The puzzle also captured what makes The 1% Club so challenging: the answer can appear surprisingly simple once the hidden pattern has been revealed, but finding that pattern under pressure is a very different matter.