Fresh Meat

Fresh Meat series 2 episode 4 review

A quieter episode of Fresh Meat this week, and a slightly fractured one.

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.

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Fresh Meat series 2 episode 3 review

This week's Fresh Meat is the best the series has delivered.

Real life is bearing down on our student housemates. Should they start thinking about careers? At a geology fair, Kingsley is suckered into a publicity photo for BP and warms to the idea of the corporate life. Girlfriend Heather (yes, they're still an item, much to Josie's annoyance) is sceptical that his musical dreams could survive inside a multinational, but as Kingsley points out, "You could see Moby or a couple of Mumfords working there."

Meanwhile, everyone else in the cast is gloriously deluded, too: JP fancies himself as a tech entrepreneur, Howard tries to give himself a makeover (and ends up looking like a "special needs line dancer") and Oregon starts a literary mag... with Professor Shales.

On this evidence, it's fair to surmise that comedian Tom Basden has some issues with BP: the writer of this week's episode covers the oil industry with a slick of righteous abuse courtesy of the ill-matched housemates. Kingsley, JP and Howard (the latter still subject to an excellent running gag about Lord of the Rings) have their heads turned by BP at a careers fair and find themselves ineptly competing for an internship. All this brings out the eco-warrior in Vod and the lonely neurotic in Josie, while Oregon clashes with a rival as she attempts to launch a magazine. Rufus Jones, so brilliant in Hunderby, makes an excellent fist of the slippery oil exec as the series treads water a little, but in an effortlessly entertaining manner.

Fresh Meat series 2, episode 3: review

I reviewed Fresh Meat's second series opener a few weeks ago, and although I found it an amusing hour's television, I felt it was lacking some of the quality from series one. Last week's second outing was an improvement, but episode three largely saw a return to the mediocrity of the first.

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.

Frest Meat review: second year

It has great performances (Nixon's little reactions are sublime), very funny scripts, good plots, excellent direction, and encapsulates the atmosphere of university social life exceptionally well.