Fresh Meat

Last night's TV: Fresh Meat

Duff pick-up lines, toxic tutors and eco-conscious sex: Fresh Meat nails the student years.

Fresh Meat, Channel 4, review

Fresh Meat is just one episode old, but already it may be the most painful comedy about social awkwardness that our gulping, stammering land has yet produced.

Fresh Meat started off worryingly but pulled through

Fresh Meat played it refreshingly straight, with a confident cast led by The Inbetweeners star Joe Thomas.

Last night's TV: Fresh Meat

What really holds the thing together is an underlying sympathy, the sense that these characters might be comically foolish but they aren't contemptible.

Fresh Meat episode 1 review: Uni haze

A trouser-less man drying some dead ducks with a hairdryer. Hmm. Fresh Meat offers a weird but powerful opening as hard-nut Vod cruises into her new (grotty) student house to discover experienced student nerd Howard with ducks hanging from the ceiling.

Review: Fresh Meat, 1.1

Overall, I thought this was marvelous from start to finish, and brilliantly scheduled to coincide with the real fresher's week.

Fresh Meat successfully launches with 1.5m viewers

The university-based comedy from Peep Show writers Sam Bain and Jesse Armstrong, Fresh Meat, debuted last night with 1.5m.

New comedy drama about a student house share from Sam Bain and Jesse Armstrong, the men who wrote Peep Show, and starring Kimberley Nixon (Cranford), Joe Thomas (Simon from The Inbetweeners) and Jack Whitehall (actually good at acting!). Don't be put off by the initial "youth" packaging: this is smart, sympathetic and pretty much adorable from the get-go. Lots of laughs, but the use of Waltz #2 by Elliott Smith at the end near breaks your heart. What an opener.

Peep Show and The ­Inbetweeners fans, listen up. Fresh Meat stars Joe Thomas and was written by Sam Bain and Jesse Armstrong, so deserves your attention.

It's a great sitcom about freshers in a university house-share - a sit so ripe with possibilities you might wonder why it hasn't been strip-mined for com before.

Actually it has; of course there was the classic The Young Ones, and some of you might have seen a short-lived BBC3 comedy a couple of years ago with much the same premise called Off The Hook, starring another Inbetweener, James Buckley.

But Fresh Meat is much more assured and has wonderfully subtle ­characters.

Joe Thomas is the token normal one as Kingsley, and Kimberley Nixon plays nice, sweet Josie, his female ­counterpart.

More intriguing are Vod (Zawe Ashton) who's like a younger, female, sexually ­ambiguous version of Peep Show's Super Hans and Oregon (Charlotte Ritchie) who tries too hard to be tough and play down her swottiness - and fails at both.

There's also Greg McHugh as Howard (think a young, Scottish Nick Frost).

But it's stand-up and panel-show regular Jack Whitehall who steals the show as cocky public schoolboy JP.

We first meet him in the men's toilet waving a wrap of cocaine at a total stranger. We've never seen Jack acting before but he turns out to be surprisingly good at it. Unless - of course - this is what he's like in real life.

Freshers' week: Playing away from home

A comedy set among first year students starts tonight on TV. But could fiction ever match the antics of real-life freshers? Will Dean introduces our writers' memories.