The 1% Club contestant wins £97,000 after cracking fiendish final question

One carefully spotted clue was enough to turn a baffling sequence of letters into a £97,000 jackpot on ITV’s The 1% Club.

Anna emerged victorious after facing Stevie in the final, while a third finalist, Sam, chose to take his £3,333 share rather than risk it on the show’s notoriously difficult 1% question.

The dramatic finish came just one day after Michelle made The 1% Club history by winning a record £194,000.

Three contestants faced the final decision

Thursday night’s episode had gradually whittled the field down until only Stevie, Sam and Anna remained.

At that point, host Lee Mack gave the three finalists a choice. They could walk away with their individual shares of the prize money, or risk everything by attempting the 1% question for the chance to claim the entire pot.

Sam decided not to gamble.

Lee confirmed that he would leave with £3,333, telling him: “Ok, Sam, you’ve decided to take your share of the money, which is £3,333. Well done Sam!”

That left Stevie and Anna to go head-to-head for the jackpot.

The pair were then presented with a question that initially looked almost impossible to decipher.

Could you solve the 1% question?

Lee asked:

“What common two-word phrase do you get if you remove three words from the following sequence?”

The letters displayed on screen were:

T W H W E R L E L E D W O O N R E D S

It was the sort of puzzle that could easily send contestants down the wrong path. But there was a clue hidden in the wording itself.

The instruction was to remove the letters making up “three words” from the sequence.

Once those letters were taken away, the remaining letters spelled out:

WELL DONE

That was the answer Anna had submitted.

Stevie, meanwhile, could not find the solution in time.

She admitted: “Something unreadable. I haven’t got it.”

Stevie’s defeat was particularly frustrating after she had managed to reach the end of the programme on two consecutive nights.

The 1% Club is designed around logic and common sense rather than conventional general knowledge, with contestants gradually eliminated as the questions become more difficult.

Anna takes the entire £97,000 prize pot

With Anna’s answer locked in, the tension finally broke when Lee revealed that she had got it right.

“Congratulations Anna, you are the winner and get everything in the prize pot – £97,000,” he announced.

Anna was visibly stunned.

“I can’t believe it!” she exclaimed.

The victory gave Anna the full £97,000 jackpot, while Stevie was left disappointed after another impressive run to the final.

Anna’s appearance was not quite over, either. Under the show’s rollover format, she was due to return on Friday and compete again.

The win also came at the end of an extraordinary run of large prizes on The 1% Club, with another contestant having claimed an even bigger amount only a day earlier.

Michelle had already broken the show’s prize record

The previous episode featured Michelle and Nathaniel battling for a staggering £194,000.

The pair faced a very different kind of 1% question, involving a fictional bank card belonging to Heidi Abbi Bedhead.

Lee asked:

“Heidi Abbi Bedhead just got a new bank card. If the picture below displays the first 12 digits of the card number, what are the final four?”

Michelle chose 8514, while Nathaniel went with 9214.

The solution depended on matching the digits to the letters represented on the card.

The first 12 digits corresponded to “Heidi Abbi Bed”. The remaining part of the name was “head”, which gave the missing digits as 8514.

Michelle had therefore selected the correct answer.

Her victory earned her £194,000, making her the biggest winner in The 1% Club‘s history at the time.

The back-to-back episodes delivered two very different final puzzles. Michelle’s record-breaking win depended on decoding the number sequence, while Anna’s £97,000 victory came from noticing that the wording of the question itself provided the key.

For viewers playing along at home, both offered the same challenge: spot the simple idea hidden inside a question that initially looks far more complicated than it really is.