Jesse Armstrong

Fresh Meat (Monday, Channel 4), Sam Bain and Jesse Armstrong's comedy drama about a group of Manchester students, is now back for its fourth and final series. Dennis Potter once said that you should regard your younger self with both tenderness and contempt, and this is a trick that Fresh Meat brilliantly pulls off with its own young characters, as, safe in the bosom of university, they try on various selves to see how well they fit. Like Bain and Armstrong's Peep Show, it's also packed with great jokes.

On Monday, with finals approaching, the students were increasingly mournful that their university days are coming to an end -- and many Fresh Meat fans, I suspect, will be feeling the same.

Fresh Meat review: time to grow up, sadly

Jesse Armstrong and Sam Bain's excellent comedy drama isn't quite as fresh as it once was - but it hasn't gone off. Just aged a little.

Fresh Meat's writers on their toga-party student days

Kitchen slugs, bathroom blazes, bodies in lakes ... as the anarchic campus comedy returns, its writers remember the wild (and not so wild) times that inspired the show.

It has been more than four years since the gang enrolled at Manchester Medlock University, and with graduation looming it's almost time for the student sitcom's japes and dramas to come to an end. As with their other hit series, Peep Show, Jesse Armstrong and Sam Bain seem determined not to let this one bow out quietly, though: the fourth and final series kicks off with Vod trying out a risky moneymaking scheme and resident rah JP getting a lesson in nepotism from older brother Tomothy.

Fresh Meat series 4: bleak truths and knob gags

We chat to the cast of Sam Bain and Jesse Armstrong's university-set comedy drama, Fresh Meat, which returns tonight on Channel 4...

Fresh Meat review

When I first watched Fresh Meat I had no idea what to expect from the show or that over four years on it would still be going strong. However somehow Sam Bain and Jesse Armstrong's university-based comedy drama has gone from strength to strength and they've been given the rare opportunity to end the series in the way they want to.

Fresh Meat: it's time for the students to grow up

We may have seen the last of Peep Show, the fantastic long-running sitcom about two mismatched housemates, but another comedy from writers Jesse Armstrong and Sam Bain still has one more hurrah to go. Fresh Meat (Channel 4), about a group of layabout, mismatched students in Manchester starring Jack Whitehall as misguided, perennially baffled public schoolboy JP, has begun its fourth and final series.

Radio Times review

So, after nine series, this is the last-ever Peep Show. Creators Sam Bain and Jesse Armstrong make every scene and every word count in a final, hilarious dose of era-ending, squirm-inducing mayhem.

Will Robert Webb and David Mitchell's El Dude Brothers, Jez and Mark, suddenly become Trotter-style winners? Will Jez and Super Hans succeed with their outrageous plot to get April's husband Angus out of the way? Will Jez face 40 without lying to his boyfriend?

While die-hard fans probably already have a good idea about the answers to these and other questions, they will not be disappointed by the excruciating, downbeat brilliance of this fabulous curtain call. This is a classic comedy that will be sorely missed.

Super Hans' real name revealed - or do they?

Writers Sam Bain and Jesse Armstrong say the truth might not be so simple, even though series nine episode two appears to confirm his real name.

Josh could learn a lot from Peep Show as it contains a realistic central conceit and two characters who you can believe in. Even though I've found the last couple of series of David Mitchell and Robert Webb's sitcom to be rather mediocre it's still been consistently funny. This final series opened six months after Mark's beloved Dobby departed for New York partly thanks to Jeremy with the pair not having talked since. Reunited at Super Hans' stag do it was business as usual for the passive aggressive pair with Jeremy having been hit the most now living in the groom-to-be's bathroom. Mark meanwhile has seemingly moved on and is now living with his bank colleague Jerry (Tim Key) with the pair enjoying documentaries about William Morris on a nightly basis. But it's clear that Mark doesn't quite know how to quit Jez and by the end of the episode they were back together and Jerry had literally been rolled out of the door. Judging from this opening instalment of the last series Peep Show is going out on a high with both Mitchell and Webb at the top of their game. Mitchell is particularly strong as the mentally weak Mark who knows his relationship with Jeremy is no good for him but keeps going back to him nonetheless. Meanwhile Webb hasn't really changed his performance of Jez since the first series which I think is part of the character's charm. The end scene in which Mark, Jez and Super Hans bundle Jerry into the lift was a classic Peep Show moment and I was laughing all the way through it. I'm just wondering how writers Sam Bain and Jesse Armstrong are going to end the series and more importantly if Mark and Jeremy are ever going to get their happy ending. In my opinion Peep Show isn't a sitcom that particularly necessitates a joyous conclusion but I wouldn't be opposed to see the El Dude Brothers finally experience some good fortune.