The 1% Club’s final question leaves all five finalists stumped over £97,000 prize

Five contestants made it all the way to the final question on The 1% Club, only to see their hopes of winning a £97,000 prize pot disappear in the space of 30 seconds.

The puzzle looked simple on the surface, but none of the remaining players managed to find the word connecting a series of capitalised words.

Would you have spotted the answer?

The £97,000 question that stopped everyone

The episode, which aired on ITV1 on May 3, 2025, saw the remaining contestants face the final challenge with £97,000 available in the prize pot.

The 1% Club, hosted by Lee Mack, is built around logic and common sense rather than traditional general knowledge. ITV describes the format as a quiz where 100 contestants begin the show and must work their way through increasingly difficult questions, with the final challenge designed to be one that only 1% of the country would answer correctly.

By the time the last question arrived, just five contestants were still standing.

Earlier questions had already produced some surprising exits, while some of the later challenges had proved less difficult. That left Lee hopeful that at least one of the five finalists might manage to crack the final puzzle.

Instead, all five were eliminated.

Can you solve the puzzle?

Lee asked the finalists:

“What new word links the capitalised words below?”

He then read out the sentence:

“My SON TED ate raw FOOD and got SICK, then went to BED with me by his SIDE.”

The five contestants had just 30 seconds to work out what connected the capitalised words.

It was a deceptively difficult word puzzle, with each player trying to find a word that could transform the sequence into something meaningful.

When the time ran out, Lee went around the contestants to hear their answers.

Their responses were different. One contestant admitted they had not even written an answer down, while others suggested words including “well” and “new”.

None of the answers was correct.

The answer was hidden in plain sight

Lee then revealed that the missing word was SEA.

The trick was to place “sea” at the beginning of each of the capitalised words.

For example:

• SON becomes SEASON
• TED becomes SEATED
• FOOD becomes SEAFOOD
• SICK becomes SEASICK
• BED becomes SEABED
• SIDE becomes SEASIDE

Once the pattern is revealed, the connection becomes much easier to see. But with only 30 seconds on the clock and six words to work through, none of the five finalists managed to find it in time.

The result was particularly painful because the entire £97,000 prize pot was left unclaimed.

Another question had already caught out 16 players

The difficult final puzzle was not the only challenge to cause trouble during the episode.

Earlier in the same show, 16 contestants were eliminated by the 80% question.

That puzzle presented viewers with three images: a ball of string, a metallic square and a cloud making a blowing motion.

The question asked:

“In this cryptic puzzle, where would you find the following images?”

Contestants were given three possible answers:

• In an orchestra
• In a cinema
• On a football pitch

The correct answer was in an orchestra.

The three images represented string, brass and wind, the three corresponding sections of an orchestra.

A tough ending for the five finalists

The final question showed just how quickly a seemingly straightforward word puzzle can become difficult under pressure.

With five contestants remaining and £97,000 at stake, every player had the same 30-second window to identify the connection. All five ultimately gave incorrect answers, meaning nobody collected the prize money.

For viewers playing along at home, however, the solution was there in the sentence all along: SEA could be added to the beginning of every capitalised word to create a new word.

The episode was part of the fourth series of The 1% Club, which returned to ITV1 in 2025 with Lee Mack as host. ITV’s format centres on logic and common sense rather than memorised knowledge, allowing contestants to compete on the same type of reasoning that made the £97,000 final puzzle so difficult.