Lad who won £99k on 1% Club kept it secret from his family for a year

Daniel O’Halloran achieved every quiz lover's dream after winning a whopping £99k jackpot on ITV quiz show The 1% Club.

For those not familiar with the show, Lee Mack guides an audience of 100 people through a series of increasingly difficult questions that fewer and fewer people know the answers to.

Each person has £1,000 which gets added to the prize pot when they get a question wrong, and the audience is whittled down after each round.

Players still in the game after making it through questions 50 percent of the public know the answer to, can chuck their cash into the prize pot to skip a question, while after the 30 percent threshold people can take their £1k and walk away.

Anyone who makes it to the end can walk away with a nifty £10,000 jackpot, but if they want to go for the full prize pot they've got to answer a question only one in 100 members of the public could figure out.

Twitter/@1PercentClubITV

That's why the show is called The 1% Club and on Saturday's (29 April) programme, Daniel was shown making it all the way through to the end, successfully answering the final question to win £99,000.

However, he decided to keep the scale of his winnings a secret from his family for almost a whole year.

While his winning episode went out just last weekend, he actually filmed it back in July 2022, and he hadn't even really planned to be on the show in the first place.

According to the Chester Standard he said: "My mum applied and I wasn’t going to, but then I got a call back and got onto the show. I’ve never applied for anything else on TV, but I really liked the format of the show, the logic-based working out of things.

"I didn’t know how I was going to do. You only have 30 seconds on each question, but I just got my head in it for those 30 seconds.

"I remember on the day, my mum and dad both called me for half an hour separately and quizzed me, which was my revision."

Twitter/@1PercentClubITV

When it came down to it, Daniel had the choice between going for the £10,000 or trying to win the £99,000 prize pot, and successfully scored the latter.

However, he decided not to tell his family the scale of his win until the show was broadcast 'for the fun of the surprise', leaving them stunned when they watched him make it all the way to the end.

Keeping a secret like that from your family would be tricky at the best of times, so Daniel did spill the beans to his grandma with it being 'our little secret we shared together'.

Meanwhile, the rest of his family knew he'd won the show but thought he'd gone for the £10,000 option, as Daniel said he 'wouldn’t have been able to keep a whole secret'.

When they watched the episode and saw him choose to take on the final question, 'they were just going nuts' as they realised what was happening.

Topics: ITV, Money, TV and Film, The 1% Club

Joe Harker

Joe graduated from the University of Salford with a degree in Journalism and worked for Reach before joining the LADbible Group. When not writing he enjoys the nerdier things in life like painting wargaming miniatures and chatting with other nerds on the internet. He's also spent a few years coaching fencing. Contact him via [email protected]

@MrJoeHarker