Channel 4 have built a great reputation for sitcoms. Recently they've given us Toast of London, Peep Show and Catastrophe so it'd be easy to think this fine run was continuing with Fresh Meat (C4, Monday) but it isn't so. On the contrary, the run has ground to a loud, embarrassing halt. Fresh Meat might inspire several emotions but none will be as potent as despair.

I mention despair because the show's set-up of a bunch of students sharing a flat will - if you're of a certain age - remind you of The Young Ones, and the comparison will be enough to provoke misery about the state of young comedy today. Aren't humans supposed to progress? The bold Alternative Comedy scene gave us rude, anarchic, hilarious characters who spewed out venom and spiky jokes about Thatcher and nuclear war, but now we have this: students in a flat with nothing to say and only tepid, vaguely humorous lines with which to say it. But perhaps we get the comedy we deserve?

Fresh Meat (Monday, Channel 4), Sam Bain and Jesse Armstrong's comedy drama about a group of Manchester students, is now back for its fourth and final series. Dennis Potter once said that you should regard your younger self with both tenderness and contempt, and this is a trick that Fresh Meat brilliantly pulls off with its own young characters, as, safe in the bosom of university, they try on various selves to see how well they fit. Like Bain and Armstrong's Peep Show, it's also packed with great jokes.

On Monday, with finals approaching, the students were increasingly mournful that their university days are coming to an end -- and many Fresh Meat fans, I suspect, will be feeling the same.

Fresh Meat, Channel 4, TV review

The antics of this larger-than-life lot still appeals way beyond the student realm.

Fresh Meat review: time to grow up, sadly

Jesse Armstrong and Sam Bain's excellent comedy drama isn't quite as fresh as it once was - but it hasn't gone off. Just aged a little.

Fresh Meat Series 4 Episode 1 recap (Link expired)

The Fresh Meat gang returned to our screens last night for the beginning of the end (of term, and the show's four-series run). While it didn't quite get off to a flier, there was enough to keep fans interested.

It has been more than four years since the gang enrolled at Manchester Medlock University, and with graduation looming it's almost time for the student sitcom's japes and dramas to come to an end. As with their other hit series, Peep Show, Jesse Armstrong and Sam Bain seem determined not to let this one bow out quietly, though: the fourth and final series kicks off with Vod trying out a risky moneymaking scheme and resident rah JP getting a lesson in nepotism from older brother Tomothy.

Fresh Meat series 4: bleak truths and knob gags

We chat to the cast of Sam Bain and Jesse Armstrong's university-set comedy drama, Fresh Meat, which returns tonight on Channel 4...

Fresh Meat review

When I first watched Fresh Meat I had no idea what to expect from the show or that over four years on it would still be going strong. However somehow Sam Bain and Jesse Armstrong's university-based comedy drama has gone from strength to strength and they've been given the rare opportunity to end the series in the way they want to.

Fresh Meat: it's time for the students to grow up

We may have seen the last of Peep Show, the fantastic long-running sitcom about two mismatched housemates, but another comedy from writers Jesse Armstrong and Sam Bain still has one more hurrah to go. Fresh Meat (Channel 4), about a group of layabout, mismatched students in Manchester starring Jack Whitehall as misguided, perennially baffled public schoolboy JP, has begun its fourth and final series.

Fresh Meat review

The writers say they were inspired by The Young Ones, but all this proves is Jack Whitehall is no Rik Mayall.