Jack Whitehall

Jack Whitehall 'missed out on Harry Potter role'

Jack Whitehall has revealed how he once auditioned for the part of Harry Potter after the casting team visited his school.

I know Fresh Meat didn't start out as a rom-com and writers Sam Bain and Jesse Armstrong still might be horrified to find their creation described as such. But that is undoubtedly what it has become, albeit in a very street-smart, sharp and funny way. It's amazing how many rom-coms forget to add the com part.

But if it was the humour that initially caught people's attention, it has long since become just one element in a show of increasing depth. Much as I admired the performances of Derek Jacobi, Anne Reid et al in Last Tango, I wasn't greatly involved with their characters and I wasn't at all put out when their hour was up. With Fresh Meat, I am. I feel a sense of loss when the closing credits roll. I've come to care about these people. I love the way they move from the deadly serious to the totally absurd mid-sentence, in the way only university students can. I love the awkwardness of their relationships. Or rather, entanglements.

As JP - his Stowe chums call him JPaedo, but be careful what you tweet - Jack Whitehall is in danger of making posh boys sympathetic and Josie's attempts to make the housemates believe she hasn't been kicked off the course were becoming more and more poignant. Only Vod could imagine Josie must have acquired a smack habit. Don't ever change, Vod. Nor you, Kingsley and Oregon. And as for Howard ...? How could Sabine have gone back to Holland?

Even the minor characters - the geology lecturer excepted - are well drawn. Professor Shales (Tony Gardner), Oregon's ex - she has now got off with his son - is a case in point. As John, the slightly seedy man having a midlife crisis in Last Tango, Gardner was fairly one-dimensional: as Shales, the slightly seedy man having a midlife crisis, his desperate sadness is almost touching. Almost. When rom-coms are this good, what's not to love?

I hope Channel 4's executives are being kind to Jack Whitehall. Because their tale of Manchester undergraduates Fresh Meat is shaping up to be the best chance they have of establishing a long-running home-grown comedy hit. I'm not saying it wouldn't survive without Whitehall's obnoxious posh boy JP. It just wouldn't be as funny.

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Corden & Whitehall take part in synchronised swimming

On Friday night's episode of A League of Their Own viewers will see the comedian slip into a swimming costume to perform a synchronised routine. James will battle it out against Jack Whitehall, who also opted for female swimwear, and Jamie Redknapp.

It's the Easter holidays (just on screen, you haven't missed a few months) and posh buffoon JP (the hilarious Jack Whitehall) invites his housemates to his rural retreat. Naturally, it's not as idyllic as it seems and scenes reminiscent of Withnail & I ensue. Josie (Kimberley Nixon) marks ex-fiancé Dave's wedding day in her own unique way, while socially inept Howard (Greg McHugh) and Dutch mature student Sabine (Jelka Van Houten) find themselves home alone together. There's soon a surprise proposition.

This student comedy adroitly captures the awkwardness of university life and is backed by A-grade performances from its terrific ensemble cast. In tonight's episode Kingsley (Joe Thomas) gets interest from a slick oil executive at the college careers fair, sparking the dour Howard's (Greg McHugh) anger. Meanwhile, JP (Jack Whitehall) comes up with some clueless money-making inventions ("a tank-copter - you basically put helicopter blades onto a tank") and Oregon's (Charlotte Ritchie) internship is scuppered by the advent of an acid-tongued rival.

Thank cosmic order for Fresh Meat, almost an hour of laugh-out-loud comic astuteness that single-handedly restored faith in the British ability to be funny. Written by Peep Show combo, Jesse Armstrong and Sam Bain, who are truly enjoying a beautiful creative moment, it's a student comedy neatly pitched between Peep Show and The Inbetweeners, and is arguably better than both.

Now in its second series, the show works on a multitude of levels. Each character is fully realised and integral to the set-up, the plots are loose but satisfyingly coherent, and the caustically absurd yet uncannily authentic dialogue succeeds in defining its own inspirationally demented world.

In Howard (Greg McHugh), the paranoid Scot, and JP (Jack Whitehall), the smug public schoolboy, the show boasts two of the finest comic creations to come along in years. Whereas the contrast between Sabine, the plain-speaking Dutchwoman (Jelka van Houten), and Me and Mrs Jones's Inca says everything that needs to be known about the difference between fresh and stale.

In last week's second episode, JP had mumps and, advised that he risked infertility, he rashly chose to store his sperm in the student house's shared freezer ice cube tray. Meanwhile the newly arrived Sabine was still getting to grips with the haphazard communal workings of the kitchen.

You might have thought you'd know how or, more precisely, where this particular climax was going to finish. The mark of the best comedy, however, is that it subverts the obvious even while playing it for all it's worth. In the end the payoff was hard to swallow, but only because it left me spluttering so violently with laughter.

Never knowingly underexposed, James Corden returns to host the sport quiz that you don't necessarily need to know a huge amount about sport to watch. Corden will have his work cut out to hog the limelight on this first show of the series, probably being confined to the long shadows cast by his Olympian guests. Chief among these will be the beaming Mo Farah, while gymnast Louis Smith ups the medal count still further. Among the regular celebs, Claudia Winkleman is onside, while Jack Whitehall continues to successfully balance the amiable and the mildly obnoxious.

While sometimes not quite the comic steak tartare the title promises, Fresh Meat still provides enough smirk-raising moments, and often some unintentionally moving ones. too. Mainly in the form of Josie and Kingsley, who are still in love with each other and pretending not to be. Even though Kingsley, who's spent the summer growing a "muff on his chin" and now quotes Buddhism For Beginners, is suddenly in demand for his "hot man meat".

But the episode belonged to braying posh boy JP (the quote-perfect Jack Whitehall) who suffered an existential crisis when his chum Giles, with whom he shared experimental "power showers" at Stowe, turns out to be gay. "To bum or not to bum," ponders JP, like a public school Hamlet in a gilet, now forced to question every "toga party", "bender" joke and doodle of a "cock cat". Whitehall hogs all the best lines and it just makes you wish there were more to go around. Hopefully, Giles and newbie "foreign" flatmate Sabine will refresh the comedy bong water in coming episodes.