Viewers of the ITV game show The 1% Club have been left puzzled by a question that also confused the show’s finalist, who failed to answer it correctly.
The show tests 100 contestant’s logic and common sense, with rounds seeing just how many of the contestants get the question correct.
ITV’s synopsis states that it is a ‘quiz show where contestants try to answer a question that only 1% of the country can get right’, and if contestants can get through all 15 rounds, they could win £100,000.
In a resurfaced clip from an episode of the quiz show, host Lee Mack reads out the last question to the show’s finalist, giving them 30 seconds to answer.
He says: “What is the first number that when spelled out has its letters in alphabetical order?”
The finalist, Elliot, answers ‘four’, but was left in dismay as the answer is instead revealed to be forty.
However, this caused an uproar among viewers, who took to TikTok to explain their confusion at the answer, questioning the spelling of 40, and trying to find out if there was another number that is spelt in alphabetical order.
One viewer asked: “How did people get to 40… I was still working out THREE.”
Some other fans wondered how ‘forty’ was the correct spelling of 40, when ‘four’ contains a ‘U’.
ITV
A different user had the same train of thought, commenting: “Since when is forty spelled without a u? You know… as in four?”
Despite this backlash, ‘forty’ is not spelt with a ‘U’ at all in Modern English, though there are spellings with the letter in historic Middle English texts.
To add more confusion to the situation, the spelling of ‘fourteen’ actually includes the ‘U’ from the original number ‘four’.
ITV
In addition to this, a number of viewers suggested that eight was actually the correct answer to the question, with someone commenting: “It’s eight! They made a mistake.”
Another viewer agreed, saying: “Why not eight? Comes before forty.”
But upon closer inspection, ‘G’ comes before ‘I’, so eight cannot be the right answer, prompting another user to express his worry: “Please tell me how people are getting eight. I’m genuinely concerned.”
After all the commotion though, it does seem as though ITV were right all along despite the confusion.
The 1% Club’s second season returned to ITV1 in April 2023, but viewers can catch up on this and last season on ITVX now.
