Sex, slugs and showers that caught fire: Fresh Meat's writers relive their toga-party student days
‘I found myself in a sea of white trousers, rugby shirts and loafers’
Sam Bain and Jesse Armstrong (Manchester University)
We came up with the idea for Fresh Meat in the final year of the last millennium, while out walking and talking on Clapham Common. Our then-recent experience of the class-clash of student life felt like a subject desperate to be written about – and Manchester Uni, where we’d met, felt like the perfect location. Unlike posher or rougher unis, it had a fascinating mix of students from all backgrounds.
JP, played by Jack Whitehall, with friend Tomithy in Fresh Meat series 4. Photograph: Mark Johnson/Channel4 Television
We both had a zeal to tackle the Jonathan (“JP”) Pembersleys of this world. One of us (Sam) went to public school in London and grew up surrounded by them. The other (Jesse) was a comprehensive kid from Shropshire who, upon arrival in Manchester, found himself swimming in a sea of white trousers, rugby shirts and loafers.
Kingsley was our anti-JP, the bright kid from an ordinary background appalled by his nemesis’s excesses. Howard was the embodiment of the many urban myths of student oddness, like the guy who lived off nothing but a huge flapjack for a year and caught scurvy. Vod was the ultimate “legend” – a drugs hoover with a high sex drive. Such a character is a male archetype, so it was fun to give the part to a woman. Josie is in many ways the emotional heart of the show: the optimistic, aspirational hard-worker whose enthusiasm can never be dimmed.
Charlotte Ritchie as Oregon. Photograph: Mark Johnson/Channel4 Television
Whenever we played “Which Fresh Meat character are you?” we’d come back to Oregon. Her burning desire to transform herself from a boring, stupid caterpillar into a stylish, intellectual butterfly felt like a defining characteristic of students – the one that drew us to create the show in the first place.
‘She could burp the alphabet and loved to flash at boys she fancied’
Penelope Skinner (University of York)
When I was a student, we didn’t pay fees and only checked our emails once a week. So there was less pressure and not much to do. I mostly watched Fifteen to One and drank “alco-pops” as we called them back then. My role model was a student who will remain nameless. She loved the band Hole and would sit in her room in halls smoking and screaming the lyrics to Violet. She had large breasts and was deeply proud of them. She would sometimes whip them out and put them on my head while I was on the phone to my mum.
She could burp the alphabet, her favourite food was kebabs, and when she was in love with a boy she would follow him round campus until she saw an opportunity to flash her massive boobs at him. She once threw herself into the campus lake (notoriously poisonous with gooseshit) in the hope that a particular boy would rescue her, but he just kept on walking.
Zawe Ashton as Vod. Photograph: Mark Johnson/Channel4 Television
In second year, we moved into a house together which she described as her “house of dreams” because her room was so small she could reach everything from her bed. Our toilet had a permanent and mysterious “wet patch” in front of it, but rather than try to fix it, we just kept a communal pair of clogs by the bathroom door.
We drank every day and washed up once a month. There was a herd of slugs on the wall in the kitchen, but we never tried to get rid of them. What could we do? We didn’t know anything about how to get rid of slugs.
Sadly, we lost touch at the end of second year following a complicated sequence of events involving an Australian girl, a canal boat and the North Yorkshire police. She never graduated. I heard a rumour she had started writing romantic fiction. Many of her exploits were too unpalatable to be used in Fresh Meat, but whenever I wondered if our characters were too extreme, I remembered her, the Ultimate Young One.

‘I’m making my signature dish,’ she said. ‘I call it vegetable munge’
Tony Roche (Warwick University)
I didn’t invent the show’s “vegetable munge”. It was a real thing. I went to a friend’s for dinner and she said: “I’m making my signature dish, I call it vegetable munge. I can’t cook by the way.” Actually her cooking was a lot better than mine. I remember once eating a breakfast that consisted solely of half a block of cheddar while a flatmate looked on saying: “Mmm, that looks nice.”
This was before we as a nation had realised food could be nice. Nowadays, I imagine most students have a Yotam Ottolenghi cookbook and eat shakshuka with labneh and grilled focaccia for breakfast before rustling up their own deconstructed, post-modern “meat sushi”, served in a pop-up immersive theatre on one side of the kitchen while DJs play ambient chewing music on the other.
Josie (Kimberley Nixon) and Howard. Photograph: Mark Johnson/Channel4 Television
In my day, accommodation used to look like something from a post-apocalyptic hellscape. An estate agent showed me one house that had actually been condemned – it was so rickety, it looked like it might fall down if you stared at it too hard. Another place had a shower that would actually catch fire (very confusing when you’re hungover). Today, I imagine most students live in charmingly renovated New York style lofts or eco-homes built on top of wind turbines.
There was no Wi-Fi back in the 20th century, so if you wanted to know what was going on, you had to the read the student paper, or a proper paper, or watch the news. Which you never did. So you never knew what was going on. Which was fine because you were too drunk or stoned to take in any information anyway. But that was before we realised living unhealthily was actually unhealthy and not knowing things was actually unhelpful. I imagine all students are clean, sober and jacked into the info-matrix 24/7 now, constantly aware of what everyone is doing everywhere and what that might mean for the dollar against the Chinese yuan.
Or maybe it’s all pretty similar. Either way it’s all good. Or it’s not. But it’s formative. And that’s the main thing. Probably.

‘I had no friends and got a 2:2 in Applied Funkology’
Jon Brown (University of Northampton)
I didn’t go to university. I ended up studying in my hometown at the University of Northampton, stuck in my childhood bedroom. Both of which are perfectly brilliant places to be. But let me tell you, they are not where the toga parties are happening. (Or at least they weren’t in 1999. I have no idea what mum and dad have been doing since I moved out.)
Worse, I found myself isolated on campus due to a combination of my sociopathic sense of superiority and the fact that I was undeniably cooler than everyone else. So I played Final Fantasy VII, worked on my hair, and slowly submerged myself into the gloomy pointlessness of mastering the bass guitar.
Howard played by Greg McHugh. Photograph: Mark Johnson/Channel4 Television
I graduated three years later – no friends, no formative experiences and a 2:2 in Applied Funkology. So really I have no idea how authentic Fresh Meat is to the student experience. It certainly isn’t authentic to mine. And for that we should all be truly grateful.
Actually, being a writer on Fresh Meat was a lot like my time at university: I learnt a lot, I cried a lot, and I didn’t have sex with anyone.
‘We did nothing but play darts and listen to the Strokes on repeat’
Tom Basden (Cambridge University)
The disheartening thing about the Fresh Meat writers’ room was that it quickly became obvious to me that I had racked up harrowingly few funny stories or noteworthy experiences at university. Granted, a fictional comedy drama is going to get through more plot over four series than your average undergrad will in three years, but had the show been based solely on my student adventures, none of the characters would have got married, or had an affair with a tutor, or run for union president.
Instead, they would have done things like spend a day trying and failing to find the botanical gardens. Or falling out with a jazz band who are doing the music for a play they’re in because they accidentally drank the bass player’s coffee (I genuinely thought it was mine). Worse still, the characters would have spent all eight episodes of series two playing darts and listening to Last Night by the Strokes on repeat.
Kingsley played by Joe Thomas. Photograph: Mark Johnson/Channel4 Television
Seeing the show’s students having all this exciting, funny shit happen to them makes me feel both warmly nostalgic and deeply envious. It reminds me of my stint at university but is also infinitely better – in the way that the film Cocktail reminds me of my short career as a barman in a gastropub.
I didn’t appreciate it back then, but thank God my housemate snapped his banjo string and the university moved a very blunt German woman into our house, or my three years as an English student would have yielded precisely nothing. I certainly don’t remember much about The Faerie Queene.
Fresh Meat returns to Channel 4 at 10pm on 22 February.
This article was amended on 22 February 2016. An earlier version gave the wrong university for Penelope Skinner.