The Return of Fresh Meat.

With the title of Fresher cruelly stolen from them, are the gang from 28 Hartnell Avenue ready to settle down in their second year studies? It doesn’t look like it. After all, second year doesn’t count too. Right?

Fresh Meat is such an agonisingly awkward, yet embarrassingly accurate, representation of what we all go through when we first experience complete freedom. We all know a guy who thinks with his dick; a friend who puts all their efforts into getting drunk and absolutely none into their studies; and a mate whose attempts to be cool are so see-through it hurts. This is what makes Fresh Meat such a winning formula – pulling in an average of a million viewers per episode - and this new eight-part series promises to be just as full of mishaps and bad decisions as the first two. With previous bad decisions ranging from shagging your professor, to changing your degree to drama to impress a girl, can the housemates get even more stupid this series?

I wouldn’t put it past them.

From the brains behind the brilliant Peep Show, Fresh Meat is hitting our screens for its third series this week. But just because the gang are technically no longer freshers, that doesn’t stop them living the freshers lifestyle. In fact, with new housemate Candice (a sheltered fresher) to take under their wing, the housemates pull out all the stops to look cool. Obviously, they fail miserably. Oregon (Charlotte Ritchie) and Vod (Zawe Ashton) peer pressure the poor girl to do drugs in her first few days away from home, leading to some pretty full on snogging and then, very shortly after, lots of vomming.

JP (Jack Whitehall) is yet again putting all his efforts into pulling, rather than actually getting a degree. Christening 28 Hartnell Avenue as ‘Pussy Haven’ and creating ‘Team Hard-On’ – which is arguably worse than the infamous Pussy Patrol à la The Inbetweeners – doesn’t seem to impress the ladies. Howard (Greg McHugh), on the other hand, seems to be a hit with one fresher in particular. Is love, or rather ‘fuckageddon’ (one of JP’s brilliant coinages this series), on the horizon for the socially awkward ‘pig man’. With a title like that, we can pretty much guarantee he will screw it up. 

The ‘Ross and Rachel of Manchester’, Kingsley and Josie (played by Joe Thomas and Kimberley Nixon), begin the series 9 hours apart as Josie was forced to transfer to Southampton after causing serious damage to someone’s face when operating dental machinery half drunk (we’ve all been there). But that doesn’t mean she doesn’t feature in this series. Oh no, we get to see her on screen, on a screen, as she seems to spend her second freshers’ week sat in her room talking to her old friends on FaceTime. With Kingsley admitting they are ‘over like Dover’, is there any chance of a reconciliation? If writing a novel for her over the summer doesn’t win her over, I don’t know what will. ‘Cos that’s not weird, or creepy. At all.

We’ve had the year of beer, the year of fear is still a long way off. Second year is the year of the spear. I wonder how much ‘spearing’ will actually take place this year. My bet is not a lot: let’s face it, they’re all awful at pulling. Women, not viewers, they’ve got that nailed.