Fresh Meat

TX: Wednesday 21st September, 10pm, Channel 4

Meet today's best talent in a brand-new comedy drama series about the hilarious and painful truths of being a student. The latest creation from Sam Bain and Jesse Armstrong, Fresh Meat follows a group of six students about to embark on the most exciting period of their lives so far: university!

Shipping up as freshers at their shared house are: JP (Jack Whitehall, in his first dramatic role), public school boy with good teeth and an inflated sense of entitlement; Kingsley (Joe Thomas. Inbetweeners), charming and crushingly insecure; Josie (Kimberley Nixon, Cranford), determined to experience ‘new things'; socially-awkward know-it-all Howard (Greg McHugh, Gary: Tank Commander); hard-living Vod (Zawe Ashton, Case Histories); and Oregon (Charlotte Ritchie), desperate to be cool and terrified of being boring.

Away from home for the first time, on the brink of adult life, they are about to discover who they really are. From the moment they first meet, their lives are destined to collide, overlap and run the whole gamut of appalling behaviour and terrible errors of judgment familiar to anyone who's ever experienced one of life's great rites of passage. Fresh Meat guest stars Robert Webb as Geology lecturer Dan and Tony Gardner as Professor Shales.

One by one, the six new students destined to be housemates congregate before term begins - although second year Howard has of course already been in solitary residence for some unspecified time. There are already some surprises in store: to his considerable bemusement, Kingsley manages to pull at the pub, but to his dismay finds the object of his attention is in fact recruiting for her Christian group. Oregon wastes no time locking horns with her lecturer, Professor Shales, at her first English tutorial - although is startled to find she has also allowed Vod to claim ownership of her first essay. And Josie ends up in bed with JP - a random encounter after which, to her horror, she realises he is in fact there to stay. Still, at least Howard is able to relinquish his outcast status - an accolade now awarded to the mysterious Paul Lamb - "the invisible man".