Fresh Meat S01E03

I quite understand. You've been burned. You had a one-night stand with Campus and swore that was the very last time you were ever going to have anything to do with university comedy. They can be scarring these things. But I'd like to introduce you to Fresh Meat. And yes, it's a bit lavatorial, and has a relish for verbal crudity (though not a lot of swearing as it happens). But I think you might get along. Because underneath the superficial similarities this student comedy from the creators of Peep Show, Sam Bain and Jesse Armstrong, is an altogether smarter and kinder affair.

Of course, it was tougher being a student 30 years ago than today, insists Stuart Jeffries. True, student grants kept me and fellow ponces in henna, Martini Bianco and Scritti Politti 12in remixes, while you are going to be in debt in your dotage, whatever Martin's Money Tips says. But we used to dream throughout the Thatcher years – dream I tell you – of a sitcom as sharp as Fresh Meat to nail our neuroses.


Instead we had The Young Ones, not so much a comedy classic as a class action suit waiting to happen. In Woody Allen's Play it Again, Sam, a character cites "insufficient laughter" as grounds for divorce: every British student in the 80s could sue The Young Ones for the same reason. My nightmares are so full of Rik Mayall's flared nostrils, Adrian Edmondson's pseudo-punk gurning, Nigel Planer's hippy hair dripping lentil stew and those hours spent waiting for them to show me the funny that each should have 20% deducted from their royalties to pay for my ongoing therapy.

At least you, when you lie in the gutter, jobless with a doctorate, awaiting the Hare Krishna van with the free curry, will be able to remember how Bain and Armstrong skewered the student experience in Fresh Meat. Of course, you won't be able to remember C4's last unicom, Campus, because you'll have locked that in your personal vault along with repressed memories of your 2009 asymmetric fringe and the summer you tweet-stalked Johnny Flynn to no effect.

You'll remember, though, thanks to Fresh Meat box sets, your fresher social bravado mixing with the equal and opposite desire to get the next train back to Godalming or whatever nowheresville you come from. If nothing else, the British have a knack for comedies about social awkwardness. That’s only natural, given that we have a knack for social awkwardness full stop. People in other cultures communicate by saying what’s on their mind. We communicate by saying anything but what’s on our mind, while expecting our interlocutor to read our true thoughts in the movements of our eyebrows or the sweat glistening on our brow. As well as comedies about social awkwardness we’ve produced a strikingly high volume of great poetry. From a nation so inarticulate, this may seem improbable, but in fact it makes perfect sense. No man with the guts to tell a girl how he felt ever wrestled with a line of pentameter.

Fresh Meat may be the most painful comedy about social awkwardness that our gulping, stammering land has yet produced. The script is a torrent of prattling self-hatred. Half the sentences in it trail off unfinished, as the speaker belatedly realises his or her own foolishness; the rest of the time, the speaker fails to realise his or her own foolishness, which is even worse. Of Fresh Meat’s six main characters, only one – JP (Jack Whitehall), the swaggering former public school boy – is consistently capable of saying what he means. And even then, you wish he wouldn’t, because he’s horrible.

All six are university students thrown together in a house-share. On the night they all met, two of them ended up going to bed with each other (thanks to booze and low self-esteem, obviously, rather than to expertise in seduction). Having only moved in that day, the girl had yet to finish unpacking. “Um… there’s no sheet,” she blurted as her paramour grappled with her in the manner of a man trying to pitch a marquee in a gale. “Do you mind if I… Could we just put a sheet on? It’s got elasticated corners, so if I take one, and you take that end… Egyptian cotton. There was a deal on, actually, if you bought the pillow case and the duvet set. Although when we got to the till, that only applied to single duvet sets. They really should’ve made that clearer before you buy.”

So thanks to Fresh Meat, you'll remember other things too. Disastrous pick-up lines and preening retorts: "So which A levels did you do?" "Maths, chemistry, physics – they call it the nutbuster." The toxic tutor with a line in undergrad evisceration. The chilling encounter in the gents with the posh twerp. He tries to lure you into a cubicle, not for sex but to get you to test if the coke he's just bought is poisoned. The advice that comes too late not to have sex with the too-perfect blonde because "she'll sell your kidneys on eBay". The never-seen house-sharer whose existence can only be inferred from otherwise inexplicable disappearances of cumin and toilet paper.

Such are the eternal rites of British tertiary education. Yet some things have changed. In 2011, student sex is necessarily environmentally friendly. When JP suggests to his one-night stand (the improbably game Kimberley Nixon) that she remove her femidom, leaving only his condom between them, he does so because "double bagging" affronts the principles of recycling.

Thus, Fresh Meat has two types of joke. One, somebody says or does something embarrassing; two, somebody says or does something cruel. And that’s more or less all you get, again and again, for a drainingly bleak hour. Peep Show lasts only half an hour, but the other thing that makes it bearable is that it contains a third type of joke: from time to time, the central characters say stuff that is purposely funny. Even if only in their own heads (Peep Show reveals its central characters’ thoughts using voice-over), they make witty comebacks and pithy observations.

As a result, we get to laugh with them, rather than just at them. The main characters in Fresh Meat, however, are rarely funny on purpose. Their suffering is unrelieved. Which means the viewer’s suffering is unrelieved, too. I'm not sure how Fresh Meat will evolve, but, refreshingly gag-dense as it is, I want it to get existentially darker – for Bain and Armstrong to do for students what they did for twentysomethings in Peep Show. Fresh Meat risks becoming as sparkling as 30 Rock with added gross-out moments, which isn't enough. It should – it must – become a tragi-comic monument to human contemptibility and futility if it is to emulate their best work.




Television Series: Fresh Meat (S01E03)
Release Date: October 2011
Actress: India Wadsworth
Video Clip Credit: Zither










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