Fresh Meat

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way – in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only. 

(A Tale of Two Cities, Charles Dickens)

I didn’t leave to go to college; I went to the same school for seven years. It wasn’t a horrible school; it was a school that instilled values of community and charity. But it was not an exciting place. Alternativism was listening to Coldplay and watching BBC2. School was drab and monotonous like Bill Murray's Groundhog Day- if eviscerated of humour. Consequently, I couldn’t wait to move from the monochrome of home to the technicolour of university. I was leaving Kansas for Oz on a whirlwind of A Levels and euphoria. This was my time.

One of the main selling points of university is the opportunity to re-invent yourself. If you have been in a school for a long period of time, there is a very real chance that you’ve become typecast in a role you never wanted. My part in the shit theatre of adolescence was Unrequited Boy #43. Like every idiot with a confidence problem, I stood sheepishly in the corner of school playgrounds, common rooms and parties furious that no girl had taken an interest in me, despite doing nothing to indicate I was interested in them. I was quiet, prone to over-thinking and quite useless with women. Given I also attended a Catholic school, I had all the skills needed to be a Monk. However, I did not want to be a Monk. I was eighteen. I did not want to be of noble mind; I wanted to be of ignoble flesh. Figuratively, I wanted to rip off my cassock and throw my penis to the wind. I was going to change. I was going to break out of the rules, the conformity, the sterility of life. This was to be Ryan's Three Year Off: a break from being me, a chance to forge a new 'I.' This was it: I was quitting my part, sacking my agent and seeking sexual employment in the bedroom farce of undergraduate study. 

In case you didn't get the reference.

It didn't work out.

At university I was pretty much the same as I was in school: a timid, anxious, insecure over-thinker with a GSOH. You can take the boy out of the town but you can’t take the character out of him. Like Coldplay, a band beloved by me at the time, I stuck to my tried and tested formula; consequently, I was well liked but a long way from the cool that magnetizes women. Despite taking the well-worn path, I did experience some new sights on the journey. I befriended – or they befriended me – people that I thought I would never be friends with. In my first year, I lived with a girl that was everything I was not: free-spirited, irresponsible and unfiltered. I thought I would never get on with her. I was wrong. Although we were never best friends, I found her exhilarating company. A textbook lesson in not to judge a book by its cover, especially when that cover has Goth make-up and a Marlboro cackle.

Also, university was the place that made me politically minded. I didn’t go on any demos (I’m too precious for the cold), but I did appreciate my fortune and misfortune. Fortune in being supported by my parents through uni; misfortune in understanding that the opportunities afforded to my peers were not afforded to me. In seminars students from private schools would talk about literature as if they were talking about the weather – they were bilingual, fluent in academia. For those of us educated by the state, we spoke about books with broken English: hamstrung by a history of large classes, we weren’t used to giving voice to our thoughts. (I know get out the violin and play the working- class hero a tune, but this felt true.)

I'm so working-class that this chap is middle-class to me.

For me, university wasn’t the proverbial land of milk and honey, rather a cesspit of red bull and deadlines. I know this definition doesn’t sound flattering, but to a large degree it is. Like a Glastonbury attendee wading in the mud, pleasure can come from embracing squalor. In my second and third year we lived in a flat that was so far below ground that we passed Satan on the stairwell. There was no sunlight at all. For two years, our letting agents held us hostage underground. We had our fights down there, but we also had many, many good times: Cups of tea in front of Deal or No Deal; pasta bakes with Neighbours; friends coming for pre-drink drinks; house parties until sunrise; hangovers ‘til sunset. The best of times; the worst of times.

Fresh Meat is a Channel 4 comedy-drama that captures this dichotomy brilliantly. It meets the Triumph and Disaster of university and treats those two impostors just the same. It begins in a student flat in Manchester, Howard is naked in the kitchen blow-drying Peking duck; Vod, looking styled by 430 Kings Road, swaggers in and tells him to ‘why don’t you tuck your cock away so I can make us a nice cup of tea.’ Following the title credits, we’re introduced to Kingsley, an academic over-achiever and neurotic over-thinker; Josie, an angel-faced potty mouth; Oregon, an assured speaker but shifty mover; and JP, a plum-mouthed braggart that would have been Bullingdon if he weren’t in Manchester. The first episode is tentative with writers Jesse Armstrong and Sam Bain (Peep Show) understandably unsure at this point where to take the characters. Director David Kerr plays it woozy with the slightly trippy camerawork of Spaced being an inspiration. By the end of the series though, the programme - like its student characters – grows into itself, becoming less tricksy and arch, delivering note-perfect humour and sentimentality.

Fresh Meat cast.

Now in its forth season Fresh Meat has developed into a show loved by its audience. Just like my own university experience, I’ve grown to like characters that I didn’t think I would. JP, played by Jack Whitehall, is a fine example of this. On the surface JP is reprehensible: born into privilege, he is the flatmates landlord whom lords over them. He is only too happy to remind them that he’s at the top of the food chain and they’re at the bottom (My accents make foreigners shit themselves. If I was born 40 years ago – I’d be running India). Despite the bluster though, he is vulnerable, needing his flatmates far more than they need them. Although I'm no fan of the stand-up Jack Whitehall, I have to acknowledge he is brilliant in this. In fact episode 6, anchored by Whitehall, is when the show becomes truly special: at the beginning of the episode JP finds out his dad is dying – here, his mask slips and we see the boy underneath. The fact that the emotional pay-off comes at the end with JP crying next to Oregon’s dead horse tells you everything you need to know about the show’s counterbalance between humour and melancholy. To make a loveable Tory is hard work, yet JP is now many people's favourite character.

Ultimately, Fresh Meat really is a show that you must catch up on. It’s even made me like Jack Whitehall - it really is that good.

The whole of Fresh Meat is available on 4OD