The 'Fresh Meat' gang bid an emotional farewell to their characters as the uni sitcom returns to Channel 4 for the last time

"We’ve been through a lot together over these five years. We’ve seen our lives change”

The cast of Channel 4's comedy Fresh Meat (Channel 4)

This is the first time that Kimberley Nixon has seen the house of Fresh Meat empty – the student digs of her alter-ego for the past five years. In particular, the actress, who plays Welsh pharmacology undergrad Josie, has just walked into the room belonging to braying posho JP, which hits her hard. For where once there were lad-mag posters on the wall, and an ocean of booze bottles on the floor, there is now only the frame of a bed – and silence. She begins to tear up.

“It’s weird to realise that the six of us will never be doing this together again,” she says, emotional. “Charlotte [Ritchie, who plays Oregon] finished last week and it threw me much more than I thought it would. It feels like, you know, when you’re playing Trivial Pursuit and you’ve got the pie? And you put the six pieces in? It just feels like one of those pieces is missing.” Zawe Ashton, Nixon’s co-star, is pissing herself with laughter. “I’d just like to say that Kimberley loves Trivial Pursuit. She’s not saying all of us are just random pieces of plastic.”

These are the last days of Fresh Meat, the Channel 4 comedy that took six mismatched uni students, smashed them together in a house-share in Manchester (where it’s also filmed), and came up with the sharpest take on undergraduate life since The Young Ones.

In a few weeks it will return in all its shambolic, horny glory for a concluding series, building to the graduation of our heroes, namely Nixon’s Josie; Ashton’s hedontic trainwreck Vod (Ashton); Ritchie’s pretentious activist Oregon; “Bantonio Banteras” himself, JP (comedian Jack Whitehall); socially inept Howard (Greg McHugh); and Josie’s on-off boyfriend, everyman’s everyman Kingsley (Joe Thomas).

It was developed by Sam Bain and Jesse Armstrong, the creators of fellow Channel 4 sitcom Peep Show – which, after nine series’, is also set to end this Wednesday (19th). “[The timing] is a weird coincidence,” says Armstrong, “but it’s good to lay waste to everything. Scorched earth.” The pair met at the University of Manchester during the 90s, where they first started thinking about a show based on the rite-of-passage. “Certain things have changed [since our student days] but the broad, emotional truths are the same whether you went to university in 1990 or 2015,” says Bain. “It’s this really weird, intense part of your life where you leave home, meet new faces, become your own person and the future presents itself. That’s a great idea for a show.”

(Channel 4)

Taking a different approach to it than Peep Show, however, Bain and Armstrong have adopted a “showrunner” role on the series over the years, overseeing it but employing a team of writers. Despite that, the show has kept a consistent comic tone, one that is both bracing and hyper-real; giving us stuff like Josie, drunk in a dental exam, drilling a hole through someone’s face or, this series, Howard emerging out of a cellar as the “Fritzl of revision”. But the real beauty is in how Fresh Meat balances those laughs with drama; its characters’ absurdity has never come at the expense of what makes them human.

Take Vod, the spiritual daughter of Peep Show’s Super Hans: a coked-up force of nature whose withering gaze and striking style has made Ashton a breakout star. But the last series went deeper into her character, with the arrival of Vod’s mum – an abusive, neglectful alcoholic – revealing the spark of her self-destruction. “I’m really proud of that episode,” says Ashton. “It’s hard when you hit a dramatic moment for these characters ‘coz you’re never sure whether it works. You need to be able to bounce back [into comedy]. But those are the bits that make Vod real.” She pauses. “I’m not ready to put her in the past tense yet.”

Series four picks up two-thirds of the way through their final year, with Vod, crippled by debt, now dealing drugs – well, the one pill she can get hold of, which she hopes will “grow a beanstalk back to the Hacienda in the 1990s”. Yet looming over the individual strands – Kingsley seeing an older woman (Ayda Field); student president Oregon going mad with power – is the sense of an ending: exams, graduation and the great abyss beyond.

Indeed, in one of the scenes I watch being filmed, Nixon’s Josie, who is the only one not preparing for exams after changing courses and going back a year, is taunting her housemates with the news that “the time until finals will be 22 hours at the beep – beep!” She then turns her attention to annoying Kingsley, who's cramming hard. “What if you turn up to your exam with a floppy hand,” she asks him, “like Edward Floppyhands.” “There’s a lot of anxiety about what they’re going to do,” says Thomas. “For those like Kingsley the stakes are important – they need to do well to get good jobs. There’s a certain sense that their degree isn’t going to lead to anything, though - a denial about facing their future.”

Someone not destined for the dole is walking, talking UniLad JP, the obnoxiously posh alpha male who – in his own words – “will probably end up being Prime Minister or something one day. I don’t want to be. It’s just that kind of shit happens to guys like me.” He’s not too far off. This series sees him visited by his older brother “Tomothy” who’s securing him a role at his banking firm. Wife, kids, a boring job he doesn’t understand – Tomothy is the ghost of grown-up future.

“He’s what things could become,” says Whitehall, “and it’s [JP’s] struggle to decide if he wants that or not. I think for some people from affluent backgrounds, university is a way of delaying the inevitable. I think he wants to extend that for as long he can.” Much like Vod, JP started as a caricature but grew in depth as his fragility and insecurity has been revealed, and his sense of entitlement punctured.

“Sitcom characters don’t tend to change,” says Armstrong, “but I think JP has. He’s softened – more open to being with different types of people. That’s the appeal of [the show’s] mix of social backgrounds, but also [Whitehall] deserves credit for his portrayal. He’s of that background so brings a lot to it himself. We even started writing towards that when we saw what he could do.”

Whitehall was privately educated at Marlborough College (originally JP’s school in the script, which was subsequently changed to Stowe after Whitehall was cast) before dropping out of first year at – yes – the University of Manchester to pursue comedy. “My dad was quite pissed off,” he says, “but I graduate in this one! So I managed to get a graduation for him finally. I got a fake certificate and a fake picture of me in the robe, which [he’s hung up] next to my sister’s real degree.”

All of the cast members I speak to feel that their characters’ journeys over the series have mirrored their own. “We’ve all [been in] such a bubble up here in Manchester,” Nixon says. “We’re all away from home, so we just have each other really. I mean, Charlotte was actually just a student when we started. It was her first job, and she didn’t know how anything worked. Now she’s an old pro! We’ve been through a lot together over these five years. We’ve seen our lives change.”

And those parallels don’t stop with the fear of the future, of striking out on your own, of leaving those days behind. For they have been left wondering: What if your university years, even pretend ones, really are the best days of your life?

“The thing I’ve come to the realisation of is the quality of the scripts you get for Fresh Meat have been so good and you don’t realise how lucky you were at the time,” as Jack Whitehall puts it. “But now it’s ended you start getting other scripts through and there’s this horrible, bleak realisation that you have to lower your standards. None of the writing is as good as Fresh Meat. It’s fucking terrifying.”

‘Fresh Meat’ returns on 5 Jan on Channel 4