‘I got to read all of Shakespeare' – meet the Dubliner leading Cambridge as captain in ‘University Challenge' final
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Dubliner Oscar Despard, from Portobello, will captain Christ's College Cambridge in the final of TV quiz show University Challenge – and live out a childhood dream in the process.
'I watched the show a lot growing up, with my mother in particular,' he said.
'So when I ended up at the University of Cambridge, it was a natural thing to try because I thought it would be quite interesting.
'I went about setting up a quiz society at Christ's College to administer the college's participation.
'We ran a two-round selection process, starting with an online quiz that people could complete in their own time.
'Then we invited the 10 best scorers to take part in an in-person round on the buzzer.'
Mr Despard (22) earned nine H1s in his Leaving Cert from Sandford Park School in Ranelagh, and was awarded the best individual prize at the BT Young Scientist exhibition in 2020.
He is studying molecular biology at Cambridge and has begun a PhD focusing on proteostasis – how cells maintain a balance of making and breaking down proteins – using cryo-electron tomography.
His mother, Professor Niamh Moran, is a scientist at the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland, and he fondly recalls watching the quiz show with her on TV over the years.
Back home in Portobello, he says his mother has been rallying the fanbase.
'My family was very excited to see me competing in University Challenge, and I think my mother gets more texts of support about it than I do,' he said.
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'My sister and my father were also both quite excited about seeing it.
'Everybody from my team is still in Cambridge, so we've actually been watching it as a team together. There's a lot of interest from the college as well.
'We've been watching it in the college bar, so we've had a decent crowd watching on TV,' he added.
To prepare for the show, Mr Despard and the team shared a spreadsheet of over 200 knowledge areas to revise.
'I got to read all of Shakespeare, which I probably wouldn't have done otherwise,' he said.
'And we did a surprising amount of video game revision – they've broadened the question topics in recent years.'
In the quarter-finals of the show, there was a question where the answer was GeoGuessr – an online game where you're dropped into a random Google Street View location and have to figure out where you are.
Mr Despard said it was a surprise to see it featured in the show, but that University Challenge has been making an effort to bring a slightly wider range of questions in recent years.
'They've included more video game-related questions, so luckily we had people doing revision specifically for that,' he said.
In a delightful twist on University Challenge, the semi-finals featured not one but two Dublin-born captains, with Mr Despard going up against Kevin Flanagan, captain of Bristol University.
Ultimately, Cambridge triumphed with a score of 220 to 50, earning a place in the final.
Mr Flanagan said he was happy to know there would be 'at least one Irish captain' in the final.
'I met Kevin very briefly before the show, because there are other quizzes at universities in the UK where people often end up crossing over,' Mr Despard said.
'But yeah, we subsequently met up. Afterwards, we went to Belfast to meet the Queen's team as a kind of get-together after we had all met in production over the summer.'
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