The 1% Club leaves 30 contestants stumped by tricky London traffic question

A deceptively simple question about London traffic was enough to eliminate 30 contestants on The 1% Club, leaving viewers to work out a mistake hidden among three seemingly ordinary street scenes.

The puzzle appeared as a 45% question, meaning the show expected 45% of the public to be able to solve it. Contestants had just 30 seconds to spot what was wrong.

Could you find the mistake before the time ran out?

Can you spot what is wrong with the traffic pictures?

Hosted by Lee Mack, ITV’s The 1% Club is built around logic, observation and common sense rather than traditional general-knowledge questions.

The challenges become progressively harder as the game goes on, with contestants eliminated whenever they give an incorrect answer. The format has repeatedly produced surprising results, with apparently straightforward questions catching large numbers of players out.

For this particular challenge, contestants were shown three pictures of London traffic side by side.

Each image featured familiar sights from the capital, including red double-decker buses, pedestrians and taxis. But one of the pictures contained a crucial mistake.

The question was:

“There’s something wrong with one of these pictures of London traffic. Which one?”

As the contestants studied the images, Lee Mack could not resist adding a joke of his own.

“I think it’s all of them… the traffic’s moving.”

They then had to lock in their answers before the 30-second countdown ended.

When the time was up, the result was a painful one for 11 contestants, who had chosen incorrectly and were eliminated.

The answer was A

The correct answer was A.

The giveaway was the position of the vehicles on the road. In picture A, the vehicles were driving on the wrong side of the road.

That small detail was enough to catch out a sizeable portion of the remaining players.

London, like the rest of the United Kingdom, drives on the left-hand side of the road, making the traffic positioning the key to the puzzle.

But there was another detail that made the result particularly interesting.

Lee revealed that 19 contestants had used their pass on the question.

That meant 30 players in total had been left flummoxed by the challenge.

It wasn’t the first time contestants had been caught out

The traffic puzzle was far from the only 1% Club question to produce a surprisingly large number of wrong answers.

In another episode, 23 contestants were eliminated by a question in the 70% round, despite what appeared to be a very straightforward piece of reasoning.

Lee asked:

“John writes with his right hand and the last word he’d write if he was writing this sentence would be be. If Keith writes with his left hand, what would be the last word he would write in the sentence above?”

The answer was simply “be.”

Whether Keith was right-handed or left-handed would not change the order of the words in the sentence. The final word would still be “be”.

The question demonstrated one of the show’s recurring tricks: contestants can sometimes become so focused on the wording of a puzzle that they overlook the most obvious interpretation. The same question has been reported as a 70% challenge that eliminated 23 players.

Another picture puzzle caught out 13 players

There was also a tricky visual question that left 13 contestants out of the game.

This time, it was the 80% question, meaning the expectation was that 80% of the public would be able to answer correctly.

Players were shown three apparently similar photographs featuring people dressed as a gorilla, a clown and a horse.

The three images were positioned differently:

• A was the right way up.
• B was upside down.
• C was tilted to the right.

The question asked:

“Which of these is not the same photo as the other two?”

Again, contestants had only 30 seconds to work it out.

The correct answer was B.

The key was not the orientation of the pictures, but the positions of the characters within them. In A and C, the gorilla is on the left and the horse is on the right. In B, those positions had been reversed.

That subtle difference was enough to eliminate 13 players.

Why The 1% Club keeps catching players out

The format of The 1% Club deliberately moves away from questions that depend on specialist knowledge.

Instead, contestants face puzzles involving logic, observation, wordplay and common sense, with a strict 30-second time limit. The questions become progressively more difficult, which means even a player who has done well in the earlier rounds can suddenly be caught by a detail they have overlooked.

That makes the traffic puzzle particularly fitting for the show. Nothing obscure was required to solve it. The answer depended on noticing something familiar and applying basic knowledge of how traffic moves in London.

The problem was having only half a minute to find it.

And for 30 contestants, that was 30 seconds too little.

The 1% Club airs on ITV1 and is available to watch on ITVX.