It's television's toughest quiz and on Monday night it was won by a team which was one-quarter Irish. Fresh from his University Challenge-winning triumph, Dubliner Conor McMeel spoke to Ryan Tubridy about Paxman, starters for 10 and how it feels to be the first one to that buzzer. The first thing Conor told Ryan was that he was relieved to be finally able to talk about the final, having had to keep things under wraps from his friends until it was broadcast.

"It only got worse the more rounds that we had aired that we won, they'd only bother me more about it. So it's a big relief now."

Conor is, let's face it, cleverer than you and me – he was a Maths student at Trinity, then he did a Masters at Oxford and he's currently doing a PhD in Imperial College, London. And it was the team from Imperial College – or just Imperial, if you're Jeremy Paxman – that was crowned 2020 Champions. But how did Conor end up being a part of Imperial's team? Well, it turns out that universities hold their own giant quiz nights and the people who keep winning get a place on the team that enters University Challenge.

"We all came into, like, a big lecture theatre, we all did this big quiz and then they take the best, maybe 20 of us, and they have us in a room doing buzzers like on the show."

Early on during the final Conor got to the buzzer first on one of those starters for 10 – and got the answer right of course, not much point in being first if you're wrong, is there? This is the question:

"The Kirkwood Gaps are regions of low population on graphs showing the distribution of what objects plotted against their semi-major orbital axes?"

Easy, right? Right. Not only did Conor know the answer, he even buzzed in before Paxman was finished asking the question, which is always more impressive.

Ryan wanted to know if it's tense playing the quiz with Paxman looking at you. Yes, is the answer. When you get all the way to the final you've done the quiz so many times you get used to it – although Paxman is definitely intimidating in the beginning, as are the many TV cameras pointed at your face.

"Maybe about an episode in I kind of stopped worrying about, like, what do I even look like when I'm sitting or what's my face like and eventually, you just sort of get into a rhythm and you don't really think about it anymore."

Ryan wondered what answer Conor was proudest of and the one quoted above from the final got a mention, but he said he was happiest with one from the quarter final, which again involved him being the quickest to the buzzer:

"It was this old, like, piece of music from a game from the PlayStation that my parents had, like, bought me when I was a kid and it was just like – I mean, I think it's, like, really cool when you get answers to questions for things that are so, like, disconnected, like, nothing that I'd, like, read in a book or, like, studied, or whatever. It was really cool to see something like that come up just from kind of day to day life. And, you know, there's nothing kind of that makes me feel better on the show than doing like a really quick buzz."

Imperial won the University Challenge final in very impressive fashion, 275 points to 105 against a previously-unbeaten Corpus Christi, Cambridge. Not too shabby. You can hear Conor's full chat with Ryan – complete with Ryan's introduction to aquafaba – by clicking here.

(The answer to the quoted question, by the way, for the two messers down the back who missed that lesson is: asteroids)

Niall Ó Sioradáin