Fresh Meat

Review: Fresh Meat, 1.5

It's an impressive show, even when it's not exactly delivering a non-stop stream of gags, because the characters are so much fan to watch, and you care about what happens to them.

The housemates head for the anti-cuts protests in London, with JP cadging a freebie to see his rugger-bugger mates in Fulham. Howard and his new friend Brian take the opportunity to spend quality time together and Vod persuades Oregon that they need to vandalise a coffee shop. Or an American. Whichever they see first. And Kingsley is once again wedged between sweet Josie and arch sex-vixen Ruth. He fails to cope with his newfound stud status. A neat directing job intercuts real student protests with the fiction and the laughs continue to flow like pig's blood down a Starbucks window.

The self-consciousness of first-year students is a rich comedy seam and the writers of this series have mined it mercilessly. Now, we're starting to wonder if we could have fewer scenes that turn on pure awkwardness - characters wincing and gabbling and saying things that come out wrong because they're so busy trying to impress each other.

But just as the problem of diminishing returns rears its head the writers slay it by taking the characters on a trip - and a very funny one. All the housemates are off to a student protest march in London - even posh berk JP, who provides glorious fish-out-of-water comedy as he tries simultaneously to fit in with and escape the march, merrily braying "Class war! How awesome is this!"

Fresh Meat hit a high note with a sex-fuelled episode

Fresh Meat is proving to be an assured and audacious series and this latest sex-themed episode was its strongest yet.

Fresh Meat 1.4 review

There was just a sense of the show flagging here, with less inventive camerawork and a script lacking in big laughs.

The casting in Fresh Meat is ­brilliant. Where has Zawe Ashton who plays Vod been hiding all these years? The same goes for Charlotte Ritchie, who plays Oregon.

I just hope these freshers fail their exams so they have to stay at uni until they're about 35 and we can keep watching.

This week, Oregon's affair with her sleazy English tutor (Lead Balloon's Tony Gardner) utterly fails to live up to her romantic ­expectations, Josie decides to split up with her boyfriend, doing Kingsley a massive favour, while JP and Howard attempt to score some drugs.

And what's Vod up to? Well, she's actually reading a book.

It takes a special kind of talent to make just reading a book funny or to deliver a line like "I've never tried risotto - who cares?" so that it becomes comedy gold.

And that's not the kind of ability they can teach in the new drama course that Kingsley has just signed up for. Although it offers other benefits.

The idea of having different writers pen each episode of a sitcom is a good one. It's what they do in American television. And with old hands such as Sam Bain and Jesse Armstrong in charge, Fresh Meat has kept up a high standard. Until now.

Tonight's episode of the student house-share comedy isn't bad, it's not bad at all. But by the standards of the series so far, it's a little... blunt. Instead of amusingly suppressed sexual tension between the student housemates, we have sex and (mostly) talk of sex, as well as drugs and talk of drugs.

The storyline that works best is between Oregon (Charlotte Ritchie)and her creepy tutor/lover Professor Shales (brilliantly played by Tony Gardner), who awkwardly criss-cross the murky waters between work and pleasure. Meanwhile, Kingsley makes a revelation about his (so far) sheltered life.

"Are you on a spectrum?" upper-class dimwit JP (Jack Whitehall) asks his geeky flatmate Howard on discovering his ambition to list "everything known to man". Whitehall's exaggerated self-portrait of a performance provides most of the best moments in this fast-improving student comedy. It's the awkward, uncertain and mainly unhappy world of undergraduate love lives which provides the backbone to this episode, however, as Kingsley (played by Joe Thomas of The Inbetweeners) learns that too much of a good thing can lead to embarrassment and Oregon (Charlotte Ritchie) discovers her tutor might not be the sophisticated George Clooney type she'd hoped.

The house is awash with hormones tonight as Oregon continues her mucky liaison with Shales and another couple discuss doing the hokey-cokey in a totally no-strings deal. Meanwhile, Kingsley begins to unexpectedly reap the benefits of swapping courses to drama and Vod has an epiphany with one of her English set texts. It's the halfway mark of series one (a second series seems a no-brainer) and anxiety is already mounting about what they'll do after series three. If Howard doesn't sign up for an MA in something, he'll have to leave and that will never do.

Another view on Fresh Meat

Student life may not be quite as full of ritualistic sex as this TV show suggests, reckons student Emily Miller...