The first series of Fresh Meat was a little hard to get into this time last year, at least for me. A fresher watching a bunch of freshers being comically awkward was a little too meta in those mysterious times. With both myself and the series comfortably in our second years, the show’s light entertainment is easier to watch; not groundbreaking stuff exactly, nor anything special for a student audience, but one of the few decent British sitcoms on television right now.

Written by 30-something-year-olds, largely for 30-something-year-olds, it is unsurprising that wistful critics cooed over the first series. The whole show reeks of reminiscence: from peculiar phallic graffiti to awkward morning-after conversation, it hardly makes for escapist viewing for current students between bouts of Cindies and desperate essay deadlines.

Nevertheless, the raison d’être is in the script. Written by Jesse Armstrong and Sam Bain, the creators of Peep Show, there are so many beautiful one-liners it’s hard not to fall in love. What Peep Show did, though, was to nail the comedy, tragedy and above all inanity of post-university, pre-middle age life. Above and beyond the awkward scenes and fantastic dialogue, there isn’t the same sense that Armstrong and Bain have captured student life in Fresh Meat.

Sure, it avoids the Skins-treatment of sex and drugs, but there is an all too self-conscious tinge to proceedings that mean it’s hard to care about what happens to the characters. Whilst characters like JP, the condescendingly brilliant ‘posh one’ played by Jack Whitehall, are almost too familiar to Cambridge students, the rest are faux-lovable cardboard cutouts.

Perhaps it’s expecting too much to hope for a sitcom which captures the self-seeking loneliness that goes with being a student, but it still feels like there is a massive gap in the market that Fresh Meat could have filled. Watching student life through the eyes of nostalgic graduates at least teaches us one thing: you don’t learn any grand life lessons at university, and ultimately an hour’s laughter is worth its weight in gold. For that alone, I’ll be tuning in next week.