A contestant on The 1% Club walked away with an impressive £97,000 after becoming the only person to correctly solve the quiz show’s notoriously difficult final question.

The ITV programme, hosted by Lee Mack, takes a very different approach to the traditional game show. Rather than testing contestants on obscure facts and general knowledge, The 1% Club challenges them to rely on logic, observation and critical thinking.

Across 15 increasingly difficult questions, contestants attempt to survive until the final round. The last question is designed to be so challenging that, theoretically, only one percent of the population should be able to answer it correctly.

Those who make it through to the end compete for a cash prize of up to £100,000. But reaching the final stage is far from guaranteed, with individual questions sometimes eliminating dozens of contestants at once.

A record number of contestants were eliminated

That was particularly evident during the episode broadcast on 7 March, when a record 25 contestants were eliminated by a single question.

By the time the game reached its final stage, only two contestants remained: Zoe and Ryan.

The pair were presented with a sequence of alarm clocks displaying different times and asked:

“What word is represented by the times on the clocks below?”

The clocks showed the numbers 12, 1, 2, 5 and 12, in that order. The sequence consisted of an alarm clock displaying 12, a digital clock showing 1, two analogue clocks showing 2 and 5, and another digital clock displaying 12.

That left the contestants with a seemingly simple challenge: work out the five-letter word represented by 12, 1, 2, 5 and 12.

Could you solve the 1% question?

@meetmaxinetv There were 2 final contestants in this edition of the TV quiz The 1% Club. One for the answer right. Would you have? Please like, follow and comment. Answer spoiler below: LABEL The hour number relates to the position of a letter in the alphabet. #tv #foryoupage❤️❤️ #itv #theonepercentclub #tvquiz ♬ Do My Ting – 🇪🇸Mônica🇪🇸

At first glance, the numbers appeared to offer little help. Ryan was unable to come up with an answer and did not submit one, leaving Zoe as the only contestant still in contention.

She eventually worked out the solution: LABEL.

The trick was to treat each number as a position in the alphabet. The 12th letter is L, the first is A, the second is B, the fifth is E, and the 12th is L again.

Put together, those letters spell LABEL.

Once the solution is revealed, the logic behind it seems straightforward. But the pressure of the final question clearly made it much harder to spot in the moment.

Zoe’s correct answer secured her the £97,000 jackpot.

The remaining £3,000 was distributed among contestants who had chosen to opt out earlier rather than risk leaving the game empty-handed.

Viewers were left scratching their heads

Ryan was far from the only person who struggled with the question. After the episode aired, several viewers took to social media to admit that they had failed to work out the answer themselves.

“Never got that. Fair play to the winner. Well deserved,” one viewer wrote.

Another was still trying to understand the solution, asking: “Can anyone explain why it’s label?”

A third viewer summed up the reaction to Zoe’s answer by writing: “Damn! Label? That’s some really lateral thinking.”

For Zoe, however, that moment of lateral thinking was enough to turn one of the show’s toughest questions into a £97,000 win.