ONE WEEK AFTER A HISTORY-MAKING £100,000 WIN… THE 1% CLUB DELIVERED A PUZZLE THAT CRUSHED FIVE FINALISTS.” Just days after a contestant achieved the seemingly impossible and became the first player to win the full jackpot on The 1% Club, the show reminded everyone why so few ever reach the top when a brutal final question left all five finalists completely stumped. What looked like another dream ending quickly turned into a slow-motion collapse as confidence disappeared, answers dried up, and a life-changing payday slipped away before their eyes. The contrast couldn’t have been more dramatic: one week the puzzle made history, the next it shattered five jackpot dreams at once. Sometimes success makes a challenge look easier than it really is.

Just a week on from a woman making history by answering an ‘impossible’ question on The 1% Club, the quiz show has managed to regain some of its status as one of the most difficult on TV.

The ITV programme sees 100 people trying to answer progressively harder questions until they reach the ‘1% question’, something that theoretically only 1% of people can answer.

The UK quiz show works on logic rather than general knowledge and, while this can make the earlier rounds surprisingly easy, the final question is often deceptively hard.

Last week’s show saw a woman, Maccisha, become the first ever winner to get all £100k, answering a nearly impossible question along the way.

The following week’s contestants weren’t as lucky but, of course, this leads to a clear question: are you able to answer the question that five finalists were stumped on?

Lee Mack offered commiserations after they were unable to get the question right (ITV)

The question, which led the five to miss out on a possible £97,000, was as follows: “When Vince announced his engagement, his friends decided to buy him some celebratory balloons.

“His Best man only bought the balloons to spell STAG LOCATION but Vince’s other friends insisted he go out and buy the additional balloons to spell CONGRATULATIONS.

“What were the other three balloon letters he needed to buy for them to be able to display the word CONGRATULATIONS?”

The question is surprisingly hard (ITV)

With enough time to sit down and put them side by side, this could be a straightforward question, but contestants on TV only had 30 seconds to find all the extra balloon letters that are needed.

The five people still in, Simon, Nicholas, Sam, Jenna, and Kit, all got it wrong, with all of them getting U correct and all but Sam getting the R correct as well.

Sam, meanwhile, was the only person to get the third and sneakiest letter of them correct, N.

If your strategy is simply to see which letters are missing in ‘STAG LOCATION’ you’d be left confused but, as ‘CONGRATULATIONS’ has two, most of the five missed it out.

The correct answer was therefore R, U, and N.

The answer caught people out who missed the repeated letter (ITV)

One fan tweeted: “As with many of these, it wasn’t hard while sat on me sofa, but I suspect my brain would scramble in the studio.”

As well as the £100,000 on the line, this is a major factor because those of us at home do not genuinely have thousands of pounds on the line.

Of the five, all but one of them left with nothing, with Kit going home with £1,000.

The 1% Club returns this Saturday, 24 January, on ITV 1.