Fresh Meat

Fresh Meat keeps up the heat on Big Brother

Channel 4 comedy draws 1.2 million viewers against Channel 5 reality show's 1.27 million.

Howard's attending to himself with the hair-dryer when he spots Vod disposing of a suspicious package in the wheelie bin. Kingsley's still smarting over Josie's sexual peccadillo but can't admit he likes her, while Oregon's trying to hide the fact she's got a car because it'll make her look posh. And Robert Webb is superbly excruciating as Dan the Geology Man, a lecturer desperate to be his students' friend. Nicely established characters and one funny line after another. Brilliant.

It's the best house-sharing sitcom since Spaced and last week's opening episode wasn't a fluke. The new series from Peep Show's Sam Bain and Jesse Armstrong delivers laugh after excruciating laugh in its second episode tonight as it skewers the student lifestyle and Russell Brand's head into the bargain.

Tonight Robert Webb turns up as an over-eager tutor, ("On Twitter I'm Dan, Dan the Geology Man!") as Kingsley and co attempt to throw a party.

While Vod's sole aim is to cop off with the lead singer in a band, Oregon (who has adopted Vod as her new role model) is desperately trying to hide the fact that she has a car lest her housemates discover that she is (gasp) secretly middle-class and normal.

Once again though it's Jack Whitehall as the obnoxious JP who's trying hardest to impress. The scene involving a rowing machine and a spliff is just superb.

It's not a treat you get every day, the joy of stumbling on a loveable, bankably funny sitcom. So make the most of this, because after the assured start in episode one, Sam Bain and Jesse Armstrong's unromantic comedy set in a student house gets into its stride tonight.

Jack Whitehall is still the standout, playing sordid toff JP, fresh from Stowe and full of phrases like "The guy's a ledge", "No problemo" and "Heinous". His assurance is a little dented tonight when he bumps into two old school chums he's desperate to impress.

Meanwhile, the awkwardness mounts between star-crossed non-lovers Kingsley (Joe Thomas) and Josie (Kimberley Nixon) as the housemates decide to have a party - and it turns into a "brodeo".

As introductory scenes go, Fresh Meat's was unforgettable. "Sorry, I've just got used to wearing trousers of the mind" was the opening line of the year (and no shilly-shallying). To be honest, Sam Bain and Jesse Armstrong's new comedy was going to need both, being (a), on Channel 4and (b), about students. And in the first episode at least, the Peep Show creators' latest managed to re-arrange the hallowed Pot Noodle and bodily fluid-stained duvet of mingin' cowp undergraduatedom and make it look new and bold.

I caution that this was only episode one because I liked the first of Campus, too, and remember how badly that series unravelled. Campus was mainly about the bored, vain, thwarted, cruel lecturers, though, and so far Fresh Meat has only given us one of those.

Long may it concentrate on the students: secretive Oregon, sweet Kingsley, scary Vod, Welshies-are-hot Josie, poshos-are-hotter-thanks-to-Downton-Factor JP, and not forgetting Howard, the token Scot with the obligatory inter-personal issues, played by Greg McHugh, who's managed to erase all memory of Gary Tank Commander with a brushed-forward barnet, one of Sarah Lund's cast-off jumpers from The Killing (The Real TV Event of the Year) and his fondness for a mixing bowl-sized helping of Coco Pops, his "one-er" of breakfast, lunch and dinner.

I root for Howard, obviously, but my favourite character is probably JP. Well, when you take his George Osborne-esque certainty, Bullingdon Club japery, monogrammed dressing gown, daddy's money, chronic chat-up technique and idiotic prefacing of the mundane (baked potato, high thread-count sheets) with gangsta rap crudeness, adding them to his sense of absolute entitlement over the best or least grotty room in the student house, he's simply irresistible.

"Yaa, boo, hiss!" This is how we're supposed to respond to JP.

Fears that oddball Vod (Zawe Ashton) may be a bloodthirsty murderer get the second episode of this student comedy from the creators of Peep Show off to a promising start - especially as the victim appears to be Russell Brand. Things become more predictable when Josie (Kimberley Nixon) suggests the housemates throw a party in the hope it might push her and Kingsley (Joe Thomas) together - hopes dashed when her boyfriend turns up unexpectedly. But that's minor trouble compared with the fallout when absentee housemate Paul discovers that JP (Jack Whitehall) has turned his room into a gym.

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Fresh Meat review

How to explain its damp-squib factor? I'm not sure. It might be that the world of the fresher is too obvious a target.

I warmed to Channel 4's Fresh Meat, a timely "dramedy" from the writers of Peep Show, and starring comedian Jack Whitehall and Simon from The Inbetweeners as a pair of first-year students arriving to share a house with other nervy, blustering innocents. The early scenes were a bit forced (a problem of social awkwardness translating into dramatic awkwardness) but there was nothing a drink and a visual knob gag couldn't put right.

Does it have the makings of something more than its load-bearing parts of sex, drugs, Pot Noodle and questionable hygiene? Well, we ended on a promising romantic standoff (soundtracked by the late troubadour of bedsit angst Elliott Smith) and it was quite funny. Who would have guessed Jack Whitehall could be so brilliantly convincing as a posh, annoying prat?

Fresh Meat's premise: six students with nothing in common forced to share a house in Manchester. But while the early publicity focused on the fact that the show stars Joe (Simon in The Inbetweeners) Thomas, anyone who saw Chickens will know that his presence is no guarantee of quality, so focus has shifted to Jack Whitehall's acting debut as the hip-hop-loving public schoolboy tosser JP.

Rightly so, because while Simon (sorry, Kingsley) has the will-they-won't-they love interest - and gets to do plenty of that scrunchy-eye, shaky-head, "I wish I'd never said that" thing that Thomas's characters are destined to do for the rest of his acting days - JP gets all the best lines.

"High motherfucking threadcount," he declares of his conquest's bedsheet. And when he's not showing respec' to his Tupac poster or dusting off his beloved bongos, JP is mainly getting drunk to enable him to bed girls so he can phone up his friends and tell them afterwards.

He's funny because he's a recognisable type, but Fresh Meat is rather too full of those and, at almost an hour, should really do more in terms of both comedy and drama. Perhaps Robert Webb's geology lecturer will provide these as the series develops. Though it's unlikely he will prove as enduring or endearing a character as the real-life Mr Drew.