The 1% Club contestants stumped by brutal word puzzles as final five fail £97,000 challenge

A deceptively simple word puzzle proved too difficult for the remaining contestants on The 1% Club, with three players falling at the 15% stage before the final five were eventually wiped out by an even tougher question.

Hosted by Lee Mack, the ITV quiz show is built around logic, lateral thinking and common sense rather than traditional general knowledge. Contestants face increasingly difficult questions as they try to make it through to the final 1% challenge, where the prize pot can reach £100,000.

In this episode, however, the questions became increasingly unforgiving as the field narrowed.

Three contestants caught out by the 15% question

With only ten contestants left, Lee Mack presented a word puzzle that required the players to find two pairs of words with the same five letters, rearranged in a different order.

The clue was:

“Which two words, that contain the same five letters as each other but in a different order, mean the same as the two words below? Fairly silent.”

The countdown began as the remaining contestants tried to work out the connection.

Lee, as usual, managed to lighten the tension with a joke, telling them that the answer was not “Silent Fairly.”

When time ran out, three of the ten contestants had given the wrong answer.

The solution was:

QUITE QUIET

“Fairly” can mean quite, while “silent” means quiet. The two answers also use the same five letters in different orders.

One contestant, Jackie, managed to get the answer right. She admitted to Lee that she was becoming “less confident with every question” as the competition became tougher.

Her correct answer, however, only bought her more time.

Jackie falls at the next hurdle

Jackie’s next challenge was the 5% question, which involved a highly unusual clock face.

The hands were positioned differently from those on a normal clock. The minute hand pointed at six, which occupied the 12 position, while the smaller hour hand was close to 10, where the number nine would normally appear.

The contestants had to work out what time the clock would show after the hands moved 30 minutes clockwise.

The correct answer was 10 o’clock.

Jackie was the only contestant eliminated by the question.

Her departure left five contestants with the chance to compete for a potential £97,000 prize.

Five contestants risk £10,000 each

By the time the final question arrived, all five remaining contestants had chosen to gamble their £10,000 prize money for the opportunity to win the larger jackpot and earn a place in the 1% Club.

Then came the question that stopped all five in their tracks.

Lee asked:

“What new word links the capitalised words below?”

The sentence read:

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

The contestants had 30 seconds to identify the word connecting all six capitalised words.

None managed to find it.

The eventual answer was:

SEA

The trick was to place SEA before each of the capitalised words, creating six new words:

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

The answer had been hiding in plain sight, but the pressure of the final round proved too much for every remaining contestant. The same puzzle and solution are independently documented in episode question guides for the 2025 series.

As a result, none of the five finalists secured the £97,000 prize pot.

The episode demonstrated exactly how quickly The 1% Club can turn a seemingly straightforward word puzzle into a major obstacle. The show’s format deliberately increases the difficulty from the opening 90% question through to the final 1% challenge, testing how contestants approach problems rather than how much general knowledge they have.

Could you have solved the final question?

The key was spotting that the capitalised words could all be transformed by adding the same three-letter word to the beginning.

Once SEA is identified, the pattern becomes clear: season, seated, seafood, seasick, seabed and seaside.

But finding that connection with the clock running down was another matter entirely.

The 1% Club is available to watch on ITVX.