Man who bags £99k on ITV’s The 1% Club keeps winning a secret from family for a year

A 24-year-old man, who was crowned the winner of The 1% Club, has revealed that he had kept his win a secret from his family for a year. Daniel O’Halloran, from Wirral, competed on the well-known ITV show in a pre-recorded episode in July 2022 against 99 other contestants but the family was unaware until the show finally aired recently.

Hosted by Lee Mack, a 100-person audience is brought through a series of questions that are progressively more challenging and to which fewer people get the answers. Each contestant has £1,000 that is added to the prize pot when they answer a question incorrectly, and after each round, the audience size is reduced.

Players who have progressed to questions with answers that 50% of the public know can toss their money into the prize pool to skip a question, while players who have reached questions with answers that 30% of the public know can take their £1,000 and go.

A £10,000 jackpot is up for grabs for anyone who gets it to the end, but in order to claim the entire prize pot, they must correctly answer a question that only one in 100 members of the general public could guess. Daniel won by making it all the way to the end and correctly answering the last question to win $99,000 on Saturday’s (April 29) episode.

Speaking to the BBC, Daniel said his relatives were "huge fans" and they knew he had won £10,000 but had no idea he had risked it all for the grand prize. He said: "They were totally shocked when they watched it.

He added: "It was incredible, everyone went nuts". The plant operator from Bebington, who describes himself as "not academic but good on logic" said it was "tough" to keep his win a surprise and had only shared the news with his grandmother. "I had to tell someone, so it was our little secret," he said.

Daniel said he had only been asked by producers not to reveal the win on social media before the show was aired last weekend, but felt he had to keep the "fun surprise" for when his family tuned in. He said: "I’ve never been on TV before and this was the first time I’d applied for anything like this.

"I never thought I would get that far. I’m not an academic, I didn’t want to carry on with education after school, but I think I do quite well in pressured situations". Mr O’Halloran, who left school at 18 with A Levels in Spanish, PE and General Studies, said he "lost control" when he realised he had won and only later found out he had actually "done a dance".

He said: "It was crazy. I was so shocked and excited, just an incredible moment.”