Tricky The 1% Club animal question sends 17 players home. Could you have solved it?
A deceptively simple animal puzzle proved too much for 17 contestants on The 1% Club, leaving players racing against the clock to work out a single missing vowel.
The ITV quiz show, hosted by Lee Mack, puts 100 contestants through a series of questions designed to test logic and common sense rather than specialist trivia. The difficulty gradually increases, eventually reaching the infamous 1% question.
But even a question aimed at 70% of the population can cause plenty of trouble.
17 contestants were eliminated
During Saturday night’s episode, contestants were given just 30 seconds to solve an animal-themed sequence.
Lee asked which vowel needed to be added to each of two groups of letters to reveal the names of two animals.
The sequences were:
LPC
LLM
As the countdown began, contestants tried to figure out what the letters could become.
Lee added a joke to clarify that the question was asking for the names of animal types, rather than human names such as Dave or Terry.
Despite the relatively early stage of the game, 17 players failed to find the correct answer.
Lee acknowledged the sizeable elimination, telling the remaining contestants that 17 people had been lost on the question.
The answer was the vowel A.
Adding it to the sequences produces:
LPC + A = ALPACA
LLM + A = LLAMA
One contestant’s answer made Lee laugh
Among those caught out was contestant Cathy Cheslin, a nail technician.
When Lee asked what she had entered, Cathy said she had chosen U.
That would have produced “Ulpucu” and “Ullumu”, prompting Lee to playfully tease her answer.
Cathy explained that she had simply rushed to put down a letter before time ran out.
The moment captured what makes The 1% Club different from a traditional quiz. Contestants are often required to spot a straightforward pattern while under intense time pressure, rather than recall obscure facts.
Another 70% question eliminated 21 players
The animal puzzle was not the only relatively early question to cause problems for the contestants.
In another episode, a 70% question eliminated an even larger group of players.
Contestants were shown the sequence:
Hot Hard Small Cold Easy ?
They were given three possible answers:
A. Big
B. Fast
C. Slow
The correct answer was A. Big.
The pattern relies on opposites. Hot is paired with cold, while hard is paired with easy. That leaves small, whose opposite is big.
Yet 21 contestants failed to spot the connection and were eliminated from the game.
Why The 1% Club can be so difficult
The format of The 1% Club is built around questions that can generally be solved through reasoning and observation rather than conventional general knowledge.
That can make apparently easy questions surprisingly difficult when contestants are working against a 30-second countdown.
The show begins with questions that are intended to be answerable by a large proportion of the population before progressively narrowing the field. The ultimate challenge is reserved for the question that only 1% of people are expected to answer correctly.
With a potential prize of £100,000, every mistake can prove costly.
For the 17 contestants caught out by the animal question, the answer was ultimately hiding in plain sight: one letter, A, was all that was needed to turn two seemingly meaningless sequences into alpaca and llama.
So, could you have spotted it before the 30 seconds ran out?