Fresh Meat is Murder

If, like me, you were once a student in one of the many venerable establishments of higher education across the United Kingdom, then it’s easy to slip into a kind of revere about a halcyon time before the grim reality of real life came along.

Absolute crap like Fresh Meat appeals to this. It’s been given the red carpet treatment on account of being from the biros of Armstrong and Bain, the guys who wrote Peep Show. I never really bought into the fandom for that show, but they did also work with Chris Morris on Four Lions, which I did enjoy. Plus anyone who has The Thick Of It in their credits earns plenty of respect from me.

But this? It comes across as something they’ve knocked out over a few liquid lunches while picking up some cheques to fund other projects.

Obviously, we get a cliché or two. There’s the geek, of course, who’s also useless at trying to pick up the cute girl from his course, there’s the lecturer desperate to be seen as hip by the students and there’s the obnoxious fuckwit who thinks he’s a lot funnier than he is. In an inspired piece of casting, the last one is played by Jack Whitehall.

Add in to that the posh lads who deride the people of Manchester as "sweaty Shaun Ryders" and the ditzy girl who pretends (?) to forget she has her own car. Really, chaps, is this the best you can do?

The root problem, I would suggest, is that the second you graduate you lose all touch with student life. You have to adjust to not being able to go on the piss four nights a week as you have to haul your sorry arse into work. Plus, as I found to my cost, you actually get older and your body decides to extract grisly revenge on three years of abuse. Also, you end up getting really pissed off with students for filling the buses up every morning after you’ve enjoyed a summer of relatively easy travel. By being a lot older than the main characters in the world they’ve created, the writers are limited to using pre-existing stereotypes.

The plot for the episode, such as it was, centred on the organisation and execution of a party. That it doesn’t go as well as planned is to be expected. It would appear that in the first episode, simmering sexual tension had been established between two characters. But oh no, the female half of that would-be-coupling actually has a boyfriend that she’s kept quiet about. And he’s a right bit of rough-and-tumble with an aggressive stance against students. That’s because he’s working class, and they’re not, I guess. The whole set-up was tiresome from start to finish: I would have been more impressed if the student chap had stuck the head on his would-be love rival.

Instead, we had to make do with yet another horrific cliché as he tried to drown out the sounds of their rampant shagging the next morning with the radio. But guess what? All he hears is more stuff to remind him of his sorry situation – an advert raising awareness of unplanned pregnancies and an Aerosmith song.

It would have been more excusable if this had been one of those Channel 4 Comedy Lab experiments that give a couple of new writers a chance to prove themselves. But this is the work of supposedly leading lights in British TV comedy. Comparisons to The Young Ones are entirely misleading: that was a show that used a vague pretext of student life to put a set of caricatures into absurd situations (finding a nuclear bomb in the kitchen, being held hostage by a psychotic bank robber). Fresh Meat just comes across as the work of two middle aged guys trying far too hard to appeal to a young demographic. Perhaps viewers aged 16-21 will find something to enjoy here, others may find themselves shaking their heads and muttering "student wankers".