The Inbetweeners will likely be confined to cinemas for its remaining lifetime, and the next series of Misfits will likely be shit after the departure of Robert “the only good thing about Misfits” Sheehan, so Channel 4 need a new “young hip person” kind of show, because we’re never going to survive on Hollyoaks and fucking Skins are we? So what have Channel 4 given us? Fresh Meat, a new comedy about university students.
Hmm, a comedy about university students? That’s new. Well you’re wrong. BBC Three had their own university sitcom a while back called Off The Hook, which was exactly that, if “off the hook” meant fucking awful. In a blog way back last summer I called it the worst thing I’ve ever seen, and it probably still is. Hopefully the writers of Fresh Meat (Peep Show’s Jesse Armstrong and Sam Bain) watched this crock of shit and made a meticulous list of notes of how not to write a university based sitcom.
Having watched the first episode of Fresh Meat, they probably didn’t. While avoiding Off The Hook is not only understandable but advised, Fresh Meat suffers from many of the same problems. The biggest being that it doesn’t feel like an actual university experience. Both shows depict a small group of “losers” living in a horrid squat far away from a campus and any other students. Are we supposed to believe that a university only has five or six students? Where are the all other dickheads? Where is the university? How did these esoteric creatures get an offer in the first place?
The answer to all these questions might be “we didn’t have the budget”, but if you don’t have the budget, don’t bother, make it something else, make it a comedy about some young twenty something flatmates, it’s not vital that they’re students unless the comedy is going to derive from that fact. When you’re at university you’re always surrounded by hundreds of people, not four. When you go out, you don’t go to a quiet pub populated by old people and Jack Whitehall. It’s about university students, but without seeing a university, how are we supposed believe this? Oh they have to write a personal statement, they’ve only just moved in (without any bags), they haven’t even started yet, but they have an assignment to complete. That’s baloney! (I’m trying it out).
The validity of the setting shouldn’t be such a concern but when the show is primarily about university students there should be at least some sense that they are students and that a university actually exists. The comedy should be about the troubles of being a student, and it’s hard to do this with only four or five characters living under one roof. Drying poultry with a hairdryer might be fine in The Mighty Boosh, but not in this. Fresh Meat seems like it’s accidentally surreal; Do girls sleep with someone they don’t really like on their first night because they just want sex? Why are they drinking a bottle of vodka in a pub toilet? It’s the little things that an OCD freak like me obsesses over. I’ve written three fucking paragraphs about it.
With the realism aside, it’s not actually terrible, but it’s not something that you should watch. The Inbetweeners’ Joe Thomas makes up part of the ensemble, playing another awkward teen as if he’s becoming Britain’s answer to Michael Cera, yet apart from being slightly awkward and slightly perverted, there’s not really much else to his character. This is the same for most of the characters, they’re all slightly something, slightly uptight or slightly hipster, but there’s nothing substantial to any character.
And yes, I mentioned Jack Whitehall earlier. That comedian who isn’t funny, acting? If he’s a bad comedian he must be a terrible actor. Which is why he’s playing himself, a posh coke head. Whitehall already has a posh accent yet exaggerates it so much it sounds hideously fake. It makes you wonder how he’s become so successful despite having so little talent. The only actual comedy comes from Greg McHugh (from Gary: Tank Commander) but there’s a sense that he’d be funny in anything and perhaps Armstrong and Bain (or Bain and Armstrong?) would have been better suited to writing a sitcom specifically for McHugh.
It’s slightly disappointing that the writers of Peep Show and Four Lions have given us Fresh Meat, they may be talented writers but this isn’t their magnum opus. I’d like to think that they weren’t involved in every aspect of the programme, that the producers specifically wanted this, and requested Jack Whitehall to be in it. Perhaps it’ll get better, but I don’t really want to find out. The fresh meat is already rotting.
*I forgot about Beaver Falls, but perhaps for a good reason.
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