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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Lip Service S01E01

Great LezBritain: Interview with Ruta Gedmintas from Lip Service

When we first went onto the Lip Service set, we cannot tell a lie, it was Ruta Gedmintas that first caught our eye. We can thank series creator, Harriet Braun for suggesting the frankly delicious haircut, but we must give her parents and genetics a massive high five for the rest.

Our interview with Ruta took place during filming back in December last year. In person, she was intense, thoughtful and extremely articulate. She talked passionately about the show and had obviously spent a lot of time studying and coming to grips with the role of Frankie.

Since the first episode aired, two things have been made clear to us; Frankie is undoubtedly the most divisive character on the show and many of you would like to have your wicked way with her. We talked to Ruta about how she got the role, the Shane comparisons, and whom in the cast she admitted to having a crush on.


AfterEllen.com: From what we have seen, Frankie is a character that will be a bit of a love/hate figure — isn't that a great character to play?
Ruta Gedmintas: Yes, definitely and I was given a bit of a licence to develop the character. Harriet (Braun) gave me the general archetype of who Frankie is and [said] I could go off and play with it, but the scripts have been great, so I have moulded to them, and they have to me.

She is someone who is very strong minded, independent and loyal to her friends but she takes a lot of risks and is a bit messed up – which, all in all, makes her a fun character to play.

AE: What was the casting process like and how did you find out you had the role?
RG: I was in Bulgaria shooting a horror movie when I was sent the script, so I was reading it in between takes of screaming while covered in blood.

It's not often — especially with the current lack of funding going into the arts — that you read a new script that catches your interest, but as soon as I read Lip Service, I thought it was really good. And when I read the breakdown for Frankie, I was like, "I can do that."

I think I went straight to the plane to the auditions, blood encrusted, and I was feeling really ill. I went to the audition and really loved everyone in the room. I had a four-hour recall where I read for lots of other people. I think, in the end, I found out about getting the part through a friend of mine texting me to say, "Well done," and I was so happy because it's such an amazing part.

AE: Did you have any qualms about Frankie being a bisexual character?
RG: No, it would be the same way I would tackle any other script. Her being bisexual is just another trait of Frankie, I didn't think, "Oh, I'm doing a lesbian show." It was about playing the part of Frankie.

AE: I have seen the pictures of you before Lip Service and the way you look now is pretty different. Tell me a bit about the makeover.
RG: [laughs] Well, I had really long blond hair before and then they cut it off short.

AE: Do you like it?
RG: I do. I really like it. I see pictures of my long hair before and I think, "What was I doing?" I kind of think it didn't really suit me and when Harriet saw me in the auditions, she told me that she was relishing the fact that my hair was going to go. [both laugh] It was quite nice having an excuse to do it because as an actress, you always want to be quite malleable and for people to see you in a variety of ways, and if you have long hair, they can do a lot with that. That's why actresses tend to have long hair. But I love it and I don't really want to go back now.

AE: The whole styling of Frankie is really spot-on and you must realise that she has the potential to become a massive lesbian favourite — do you feel prepared for that?
RG: I don't know. Harriet has said that to me before, but we will see. The styling has been fun and Leslie the costume designer is great. We have shared a lot of similar ideas on how Frankie should look and just added a few quirks here and there. Leslie is great because she is willing to work with the story as well. Frankie's storyline gets a lot darker towards the end of the series, so we've taken that through into the colours I wear as well.

AE: Frankie is already being compared to the character of Shane in The L Word. Do you see the similarities and what would you say are the biggest differences are between the characters?
RG: There is an archetypal similarity between [Frankie and Shane] in that androgynous, boyish, cool kind of thing, so we are obviously going to have comparisons drawn between us. Frankie uses sex as escapism and as a means of control, which I guess Shane used as well. And there is the short haircut but I think that is as far as the similarity goes. Frankie is a lot darker than Shane is. And Shane is seen by her friends as very trendy and doesn't really put a foot wrong with them, whereas Frankie kind of tests boundaries a lot more than Shane did.

I think the big difference between The L Word and Lip Service is that The L Word kind of tackles major lesbian issues, whereas this show is about three lesbians living in Glasgow and just their general lives. And obviously, it's not quite as glitzy as LA – they don't have the money.

AE: Is there anything you had to do to get yourself in the mindset of playing Frankie?
RG: At our first costume fitting, the director gave us a guide to lesbian sex, and told us all to read the book cover-to-cover. I started reading it on the plane on the way back from Glasgow and I didn't realise there were pictures the whole way through it. I was flying with a granny on one side of me and a little kid on the other, and just flicking through it. I opened it at a page with a massive picture of a woman with nipple clamps on and saying, "Oh sorry. This is for work."

In terms of getting into Frankie's character, I approached it the same way I do with every character. I look at images and play music and I read stuff about the kinds of things they have gone through and are going through. I have a Frankie mood board that has everything that is inspirational to me, and I have a Frankie playlist on my iPod that I listened to everyday during filming.

AE: What's on that playlist?
RG: There is one track that is the "Frankie track" but I want to keep that just for me. But if I have to be really loud and a bit lairy, then I'll listen to The Black Eyed Peas. If I have to be sexy, I listen to something like Peaches, and if I have to be really emotional, then there's a lot of Damien Rice and stuff like that. It's just using stuff that I think will help me relate to where Frankie is.

AE: You have a lot of sex scenes. Were you nervous about doing these?
RG: There is always a bit of nerves when doing it. It is such a cliché thing to say but they are the unsexiest of things when you are filming them. The sex scenes were probably the biggest challenge for me because Frankie is quite a predator and so she has to be extremely confident, which is difficult when you are naked in a room full of people.

AE: How was filming those sex scenes in the Glasgow weather?
RG: The flat we have been filming in for the past three weeks has been freezing — an absolute freezer. So that has been interesting trying to pretend that you are really warm and sensual but you're actually in an icebox.

AE: How are all the cast getting on?
RG: We have been really lucky with the cast. I kind of went onto set thinking, "Oh God, a bunch of females. There could be bitching," but actually, it has been lovely. Everyone is so nice and you can actually see why everyone has been cast in their parts.

AE: Have you been out and about much together?
RG: I think I have been out, at the most, three times in three months, just because my schedule has been really crazy. I have been working everyday and if I ever get a day off, I think "Brilliant, a day off. I can learn lines."

We did have the wrap party a few days ago and you could tell that none of us had been out much as we were all, "Yeah, sambuca!" but that has been pretty much it.

AE: What do you hope happens from Lip Service?
RG: I haven't really thought about it, but I just hope people think it's a good show. I don't like watching myself but I will because I think it is the only way to learn. But I won't watch it with other people. I'll be in a darkened room watching from between my fingers and I will probably hate everything I do. But I do want to see it. I would like to see everyone else's performances as well.

We saw a cut together at the wrap party and just seeing Fiona Button do her scenes, I felt like a proud mum — she is so good.

AE: Apart from Lip Service, have you got anything else in production?
RG: I have the horror movie I mentioned, Prowl, that comes out in April. I did another indie film in New York at the beginning of the year called Zero Sun but I am not sure when that is out. Other than that, I am off to LA for a few meetings and a bit of a holiday. I go every year and always stay in Venice. I think it is kind of like Camden in LA.

AE: Lastly, have you ever had a girl crush?
RG: I have always had a crush on Angelina Jolie. I think she's beautiful, plus I've developed a bit of a crush on Heather [Peace.] I think she's so cool and beautiful.

Television Series: Lip Service (S01E01- In Cold Blood)
Release Date: October 2010
Actress: Ruta Gedmintas & India Wadsworth
Video Clip Credit: In The Raw










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