ITV contestants miss out on record £1.2 million gameshow win on brutally obscure question

A pair of contestants on Ant and Dec's Limitless Win were within touching distance of an incredible £1.2 million prize, only to be faced with an incredibly difficult question that resulted in them walking away with £75,000.

Father and daughter duo David and Emma appeared on the ITV show where the prize pot is technically limitless as long as you keep getting questions correct, though they become increasingly difficult and the most anyone has ever won is a million quid.

That was done in 2024 by NHS workers Helen and Charlie when they realised they knew the answer to how many years it was since Blur's song 'Country House' beat Oasis to the UK number one, which of course happened in 1995 so was 29 years ago from when they were asked the question.

David and Emma were one question away from winning even more than that but they were posed with a fiendishly difficult puzzle to solve.

The question was: "Including Thomas the Tank Engine, how many children's picture books were written by the Reverend Awdry in 'The Railway Series'?"

Emma and her dad David did very well on Limitless Win, but they faced a very difficult question (ITV)

Dear reader, I f**king loved the Thomas the Tank Engine books as a child and I couldn't tell you the right answer to this, but would have guessed around '20' and been wrong.

For anyone not aware, Rev Wilbert Awdry was a parish priest who created the iconic children's character Thomas the Tank Engine.

While Thomas is nowadays impossible to avoid, other lesser known books in the series include Henry the Green Engine, Toby the Tram Engine, Percy the Small Engine and Gordon the Big Engine.

The stories were told to Awdry's son Christopher when he was sick with measles. While the Fat Controller (originally the Fat Director) appeared in the first book The Three Railway Engines, published in 1945, Thomas didn't make his debut until the follow-up in 1946.

David had suggested there were 15 books in the series, but Emma convinced him that since they didn't know the answer they would be safer cashing out and walking away with £75,000.

It's not nothing and they both did very well but they could have won more than a million quid had they not run into a fiendishly difficult question, and what's even more painful is that they could possibly have risked it and won the money.

David's guess of 15 was not correct but the father and daughter had 18 lives left, and on Limitless Win when you get a question right you add five lives to your total, and if your answer to a question is wrong but lower than the correct one you can use lives to keep you in the game.

Given that the correct answer was '26' they had enough lives that they could have stayed in the game, but since they didn't know the correct answer it would have been a huge risk to try this.

Do you know how many Railway Series books there are? Probably not (Creative Touch Imaging Ltd./NurPhoto via Getty Images)

If you guess more than the right answer on Limitless Win then lives won't save you and you'll be saying goodbye to Ant and Dec before you know it.

It's part of the pain of watching quiz shows, there's almost always a point where the contestants hit a question they don't know the answer to but they had it in them to get it right.

We might be sitting on the sofa screaming at them to just keep going because they almost have it, but it's a very different prospect for those who are in the studio and facing down the prospect of losing the money they've already won in pursuit of a bigger payday.