Giving up an hour of your life – an hour you could have spent, for example, watching The Inbetweeners – to listen to ‘new student writing’ seems like a dangerous, nay, subversive idea. Why risk melting slowly into your seat while wave after terrible wave of non-ironic half-rhymes and metaphors for heartbreak washes away any respect for the craft you may have had to begin with?

Yet Hatch manages to pull it off extremely well. Packing out the Corpus Playroom, the first night of the showcase was a success; what’s more, most of the writing did not leave me inspired to write my own elegy. There seemed to be no obvious criteria on which the pieces were judged, suggesting a pleasing open-mindedness and inclusiveness from the organisers. Although this led to a mélange of styles, lengths and perhaps standards throughout the evening, an easy-going, casual collection one could dip in and out of was simultaneously created.

Inevitably, some poems stood out more than others, such as Sophie Peacock’s Maths, which harkened back to the margin-doodling boredom of that doom-laden class, and profited from the writer’s excellent comic narration. Poems which were not delievered well inevitably suffered in what is, after all, a performance space. The highly anticipated short plays were something of a disappointment, often falling just short of suspending disbelief, despite using Cambridge’s most experienced actors. However, Thomas Moodie’s Timothy Kills Frederic paired a simple piece with great comedy talent in a laugh-out-loud performance that ended the evening with a bang.

Anyone who has heard Tinie Tempah’s ‘Pass Out’ will know that there ain’t nobody fresher because he’s ravin with the freshers. Hatch is like the Tinie Tempah of Cambridge. One of the best things about it is that it provides not only a platform for new talent (often freshers), but an audience full of experienced writers and actors, who are then exposed to the new writing. It’s also a comparatively approachable opportunity to have the Footlights perform your work, short of spending half your life at the ADC, and should be a great encouragement not only to future Smoker participants but to serious playwriters, too.

It was also pleasant to see director’s nightmare Corpus ‘why-the-L-shape’ Playroom turned into a cosy, informal setting for an evening of poetry. At the extortionate price of £5, though, with all profits going "straight back into Hatch", we can only hope for something even more special next time.