Fresh Meat

University flatshare setting

In comedy, there are a relatively limited number of situations that can be exploited for humour whilst remaining familiar to a large enough portion of the viewing public to be identifiable and popular. This is self-evident when one looks at the reoccurrence of situations in comedy, and the settings of popular sitcoms: the family home and the office workplace are two clear examples. But there are also a subset of familiar situations that would seem obvious settings and providers of conflict and camaraderie, which have for some reason been neglected.

In Fresh Meat, we are taken to a world hinted at in BBC Three's 2009 sitcom Off The Hook, but last visited properly in 1984 by The Young Ones: the world of the student flatshare.

Flatshares themselves are a relatively common comedy scenario, from Grownups to Not Going Out and Babes In The Wood, but most of these scenarios have some element of agreement between the parties about residing together - but when a group of disparate strangers are thrown into a house by a university accommodation official, they have no choice but to try and get along.

And so we come to Fresh Meat. From the masters of the begrudging-friends-flatshare, Sam Bain and Jesse Armstrong, who also created and write Peep Show, come quiet-but-nice Kingsley, posh boy JP, mildly disturbing Scotsman Howard, unflappable 'cool' girl Vod, down-to-Earth Josie and hard-working Oregon.

Inevitably in a mixed environment, there's a fair amount of sexual tension in the air (not at all helped by the unwitting midnight dalliances of some of the young adults); there're also bags of personal and emotional paranoia, some lifestyle reinvention, further romantic entanglements, a helping of good old-fashioned peer pressure - and that's before anyone's even left the house!