The 1% Club Christmas Special ends with two players splitting a £99,000 jackpot after a fiendish festive riddle
Two contestants walked away with £49,500 each after solving the final question on The 1% Club Christmas Special — but the answer was hidden in a familiar Christmas poem in a way that left several players stumped.
Lee Mack returned to host the festive edition of the ITV quiz, with 100 contestants taking part in the game.
After a series of questions, just four players survived to reach the 1% question, with £99,000 in the jackpot.
A Christmas twist changed everything
Before revealing the final question, Lee explained that the rules would be slightly different for the Christmas Special.
Rather than putting the usual £10,000 at stake at this stage, all four remaining contestants were guaranteed a share of that amount.
That meant there was no financial risk in attempting the final puzzle, leaving the players free to take their best shot at the notoriously difficult 1% question.
Lee then presented them with a festive challenge:
“In the words below, which animal appears twice before a mouse does?”
The contestants were shown a passage from A Visit From St. Nicholas, the famous Christmas poem by Clement Clarke Moore.
Although some viewers may not immediately recognise the poem by its title, its opening lines are among the most familiar words associated with Christmas:
“Twas the night before Christmas, when all through the house, not a creature was stirring, not even a mouse.”
The challenge was to find an animal that appeared twice in those words before reaching “mouse”.
Did you spot the hidden answer?
Once the clock ran out, Lee asked each of the four remaining contestants to reveal what they had written.
The first woman answered “hen”.
The second had left her answer blank.
The third contestant guessed “dog”.
The fourth also went with “hen”.
Lee then revealed that “hen” was indeed the correct answer.
The word appears twice through the joining of letters across the text: once at the end of “the” and the beginning of “night”, and again within “when”.
That meant two of the four contestants had successfully cracked the final puzzle.
Two winners share the £99,000 prize
With two players giving the correct answer, the £99,000 jackpot was split equally between them.
Each contestant therefore took home £49,500, providing a sizeable Christmas windfall.
The festive episode followed the show’s first-ever Rollover Week, which had recently produced another major moment when one contestant made history by taking the entire £100,000 jackpot.
The 1% Club airs on ITV1 and is also available on ITVX.
