To its most die-hard fans, University Challenge has given the world three cult icons: Bamber Gascoigne, Jeremy Paxman, and a man named Dave Garda.
The first two are legendary former hosts of the BBC quiz show. The third? Well, he’s a twenty-something trivia enthusiast from a small town in the Midlands.
Garda is, or rather was, University Challenge’s best-known and most loved social media ‘influencer’.
He achieved this hallowed status after deciding, back in 2018, to set up a YouTube channel devoted entirely to the show. Or, specifically, to uploading every new episode of the programme.
The simple format turned out to be hugely popular, soon attracting millions of viewers. Garda built a particularly strong following in countries where the show isn’t usually found on television, where he provided a vital service. He also became well-known among contestants, who’d use his library of online videos to get some practice before heading into the studio.
Garda’s status as a bona fide University Challenge celebrity was cemented in 2021. Half-way through an otherwise unremarkable episode, a flummoxed contestant from London Business School jokingly offered ‘Dave Garda?’ as an (incorrect) answer to one of then-host Jeremy Paxman’s ‘bonus’ questions.
Fans understandably went wild, deluging online message boards with comments about the incident. Garda, who had thus far never been seen in public, then posted footage of himself doubling up in shock as he watched the episode in his front room.
‘This has left me in complete and utter shock, a bit like you guys in the community,’ he wrote. ‘I asked [on YouTube] if you would like to see my live reaction to this particular moment, because my home CCTV caught me almost choking on my cup of tea. So, um, yeah, you guys are in favour of it so here it is. Enjoy!’
Alex Smith with Countdown’s Susie Dent
The clip, which marked the first time the bespectacled Garda had appeared on social media in person, went viral. Speaking in a soft Brummie accent, he described the film as ‘my official voice reveal’.
Over subsequent months, the University Challenge YouTuber seemed to revel in his fame, uploading pithy remarks about episodes and contestants to a variety of social media platforms, where he amassed hundreds of thousands of followers.
Then disaster struck. In early 2023, Dave Garda contacted his army of subscribers with some terrible news: he’d been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer.
Bravely, he pledged to carry on uploading University Challenge episodes to the internet while he fought the disease. He also pledged to take part in fundraisers to help other victims.Â
One such venture saw him take a break from chemotherapy to walk laps of the local park, Captain Tom-style. It raised about £900. A couple of months later, Garda solicited donations for a sponsored swim and fun run. Another £600 was added to the kitty.
Elsewhere, fans of his channel were invited to take part in an online version of the ITV quiz The One Percent Club. In return for an entry fee of £10, paid via PayPal, they were promised a chance to ‘win a cash prize’.
An episode, filmed over the online-meeting platform Teams was deeply moving. Garda, who hosted, wore a dark suit, but seemed in poor health, with medical tubes up each nostril.
Not long afterwards, followers were given a stark update on Garda’s health: he’d been admitted to hospital, where doctors had revealed that nothing more could be done.
Around a fortnight later, on July 8, came the news that the University Challenge ‘community’ had long dreaded: in a message uploaded to Garda’s YouTube page, a friend named Connor announced his death.
‘It’s with immense sadness that yesterday evening we lost our beloved Dave after a brave battle with pancreatic cancer,’ read the announcement. ‘We are all gutted… and I know University Challenge contestants are thankful for this update. I am unsure as to whether we can do something in memory for him, like asking the BBC to put a dedication to Dave at the end of one of their programmes, or making a pin-badge that future contestants could wear in memory of Dave.
‘But that would be wonderful if it were possible. In the meantime, please donate to a fundraiser set up in Dave’s memory.’ Readers were told, then directed to a page on GoFundMe, a crowd-funding website which had been used for all of Garda’s previous appeals. They were told that any donations: ‘will be used to help with funeral costs, cost of living and for Dave’s partner Jodie and what would have been their first child together’.
Illustrating the whole was a screenshot of him taken from the online version of ‘The One Percent Club,’ in which he again appeared to be wearing the suit with medical tubes attached to his nose.
Viral video of fake ‘Dave Garda’
It was, all told, heart-rending stuff. And the wallets of fans duly opened. Within a few days, the appeal had raised £3,700.
‘I didn’t realise Dave was so young; rest in peace,’ wrote one donor. Another said they were mourning ‘such a tragic loss,’ adding: ‘To think that he and his partner were expecting their first child together.’
Capturing the mood of the University Challenge fan ‘community,’ a third said: ‘Very sad news. Condolences to his family. University Challenge will never be the same without Dave Garda.’ And so on.
In normal circumstances, the short, sad story of Dave Garda might have ended there, with his archive of old University Challenge videos remaining on YouTube as a sort of lasting memorial to his brush with online fame.
But there’s a twist. Quite a bizarre one, too. Because it turns out that Dave Garda never existed. Instead, the BBC show’s most famous ‘influencer,’ and his heart-rending tale, were part of a hoax designed to persuade suggestible fans of University Challenge to part with their money.
His entire life, and in particular the final months in which he embarked on a series of fundraising ventures to, as fans were told, ‘distract himself from the cancer progression’ as part of a battle that he ‘fought to the very end,’ was pure invention.
Donations raised during the appeals never went to good causes. It was all a big fraud.
This remarkable fact began to emerge in the days after Garda’s tragic ‘death,’ as fans struggled to make sense of how a man in his early 20s, who just a few weeks earlier had swum 60 lengths of his local pool and embarked on a ‘fun run,’ could have so suddenly succumbed to a condition which only usually affects patients over the age of 45.
The group of followers who had met virtually with Garda, during his final weeks, to film ‘The One Percent Club’, began to smell a rat. It emerged that although each of them had paid £10 to enter the event, not one had received the ‘cash prize’.
Then a group of Dave Garda fans in a chatroom realised that his profile on Apterous, a social media site where quiz show enthusiasts play online games, had been in active use several days after he’d supposedly died from cancer.
So who was behind the whole scam? Well, here’s where things get even weirder. Suspicion soon began to fall on the ‘friend’ of Dave Garda who had set up his memorial GoFundMe appeal. The page, on the online crowdfunding website, listed one ‘Alex Smith’ as its creator and, in the small print, its immediate beneficiary.
Smith was a quite well-known figure in the TV quiz community, having appeared several years previously in four episodes of Countdown. He’s also been a contestant on The Tournament, a BBC show fronted by Alex Scott which ran from 2021 until 2022, along with Password, a word-based show on Channel 4 fronted by comedians Alan Carr and Daisy May Cooper.
When online sleuths compared pictures of Smith on the programmes with somewhat grainy online videos of Garda, the two men appeared to look very similar. What’s more, his Brummie accent was virtually identical. In the late summer of 2023, a long and anonymous post about it all appeared on Reddit, a social media site, in a forum popular with University Challenge fans.
It concluded that Alex Smith was behind the hoax. In a lengthy thread on Twitter, an academic named Dr Alexandra Hardwick, who lectures in Greek and Latin at Oxford (and had previously appeared on the show as captain of the Magdalen College team) made similar allegations.
House where Alex Smith lived
The claims were denied by Smith himself, via a post on Reddit in which he told readers: ‘I was just made aware of this fake fundraiser. I am horrified about this. I did not create the fundraiser, and I am upset that my own face has been used… I am absolutely appalled.’
On YouTube, ‘Connor’ also popped up to ‘address some trolls on social media trying to say that this is a scam stunt and that Dave Garda doesn’t exist’.
Describing Alex Smith as Garda’s ‘closest friend’, Connor wrote: ‘I don’t know who these people think they are trying to degrade and say this thing is a farce. I find this incredibly insensitive I have told Jodie and she is angry at that small group of people who think it’s OK to encourage others not to donate to the fundraiser.’
That didn’t silence the doubters, however. And shortly afterwards, almost every trace of Dave Garda suddenly vanished from the internet. His YouTube channel, with its unique archive of old University Challenge episodes, was shut down. His various GoFundMe pages and social media profiles were deleted.
As quickly as he’d appeared, the quiz show influencer vanished.
His story has, however, lived on. Earlier this month, an American podcast named ‘Blocked and Reported’, which focuses on what it describes as ‘the craziest, silliest most sociopathic’ corners of the internet, released an episode on the affair entitled ‘The Quiet Life and Tragic Death of Dave Garda’.
It examined evidence about the money-making scam and concluded that ‘Garda’ was almost certainly created by Smith. But since the show’s hosts were unable to put their findings to the man himself, it’s impossible, they said, to be entirely sure.
Or at least it was. Because this week, I finally tracked down the mysterious Alex Smith, a 24-year-old man who was born in March 2000 in Birmingham and now lives in a small town somewhere in the Midlands. And he confessed everything.
Key to establishing his guilt was the viral video of ‘Dave Garda’ watching himself being named on University Challenge. The sitting room it was filmed in was identical to one featured in sales particulars of a semi-detached house that Smith lived in at the time, before moving late last year.
It should be stressed that Smith is in many ways an endearing character, and it was impossible to hear his confession without feeling some sympathy.
While he has made some terrible mistakes, he was relatively young at the time. What’s more, he claims to have refunded all of his victims, saying that he asked GoFundMe to return all the money donated to ‘Garda’s’ appeals when he shut the pages down. The whole, bizarre tale actually began in 2017, when Smith – a somewhat eccentric individual, who has been diagnosed with autism – became obsessed with TV trivia shows.
While still a teenager, he appeared four times on Countdown, posing for souvenir photos with some of its celebrity hosts.
Shortly afterwards, he decided to set up the ‘Dave Garda’ YouTube page anonymously, to provide a service to fellow fans.
The name ‘Dave Garda’ was, he says, partly a tribute to his favourite TV show Only Fools And Horses (in which the character Trigger regularly calls Rodney Trotter ‘Dave’). The alter-ego’s surname was, meanwhile, inspired by the Italian lake.
At the time, Smith was living with his father, Robert (his parents had divorced a decade earlier). But in late 2019, tragedy struck: Robert died suddenly. He’d been suffering from oesophageal cancer, but hadn’t told friends and family.
During lockdown, the following year, Alex found himself alone, with only the internet for company. Then in his early 20s, he began spending extended periods of time on social media, and fell victim, he says, to a cryptocurrency scam, losing a significant portion of his inheritance.
When we spoke, he claimed to have set up the fraudulent GoFundMe campaigns in a bid to earn the cash back.
‘I was 19 when Dad passed away from cancer suddenly,’ Smith told me. ‘He knew he was dying but chose not to tell me. Being autistic, it was a massive shock. I struggled a lot and then Covid came and I was stuck in house in a dark place on my own.
‘I had no one to talk to. I was lonely, depressed and looking for ways to build my life back, when I was conned out of money by an Instagram Bitcoin scam. I am ashamed to say that I then used my platform to try to raise money so I could live again financially.’
Smith’s first GoFundMe appeal raised a few hundred pounds. But over time, the fraud began to spiral out of control as he created social media accounts for a cast of fictitious online ‘friends’ of Garda.
When questions began to be asked, the edifice crumbled.
‘After a few months, I realised that what I was doing was wrong and immediately stopped,’ Smith told me. ‘I have since refunded every single penny to everyone who contributed. I deeply regret the whole thing, and I wish I could take it all back. I am sincerely sorry for what has happened and I can only ask for forgiveness from everyone.’
Smith says he’s since turned over a new leaf and is ‘trying to move on with my life honestly, as everyone in the world should do’.
It’s hard not to wish him well. For although ‘Dave Garda’ was ultimately the vehicle for an elaborate fraud, he also brought joy to many people. Assuming his creator is sincerely sorry – and I have no reason to doubt Smith’s apology – he almost certainly deserves a chance at a fresh start. Or, as they might say on University Challenge, a fresh starter for ten.
