Nine contestants miss out as two split £95,000 on The 1% Club final question
Eleven contestants made it all the way to the final question on The 1% Club, but only two managed to solve the last puzzle and claim a share of the £95,000 jackpot.
The dramatic finale, which aired on ITV in July 2025, came down to a deceptively simple sequence of letters. With just 30 seconds to find the missing letter, the majority of finalists were unable to spot the pattern.
Eleven players faced one final puzzle
Hosted by Lee Mack, The 1% Club puts 100 contestants through a series of questions designed to test logic and problem-solving skills.
On this occasion, 11 players survived until the final stage, giving them the opportunity to split the £95,000 prize pot if they could all answer the last question correctly.
Lee presented them with the sequence:
YYHLY?YTRRRR
The question was straightforward:
“What letter replaces the question mark in this sequence?”
The contestants had 30 seconds to work out the missing letter.
The answers were all over the place
When time ran out, Lee asked the finalists to reveal their choices.
The answers included H, T, E, T, R, H, N, E, L, Y and T, showing just how differently the contestants had interpreted the sequence.
Lee noted the wide range of answers, remarking that there was a chance someone could win big that night.
But when the correct solution was revealed, only two contestants had managed to identify it.
The hidden pattern was in the months
The answer was E.
The sequence was made up of the last letters of the 12 months of the year, in order:
- January
- February
- March
- April
- May
- June
- July
- August
- September
- October
- November
- December
That made the missing letter after Y Y H L Y an E, completing the sequence.
The two contestants who spotted the connection were Joe Clark and Liz Casey.
Rather than splitting the jackpot 11 ways, they were the only two to answer correctly, meaning each walked away with £47,500.
A deceptively simple final challenge
The question was a classic example of how The 1% Club can turn a familiar piece of information into a difficult pattern-recognition test.
With the sequence displayed as a string of letters and only 30 seconds on the clock, contestants had to work out what each character represented rather than simply looking for a conventional alphabetical pattern.
In the end, nine players were left without a share of the £95,000, while Joe and Liz were the only two who managed to make the crucial connection before time ran out.
