After years of commissioners overlooking the comedic potential of student life, there has recently been a scramble to produce university-based sitcoms.

Whatever I thought about it, Campus wasn't a hit with audiences and looks to have been axed for the more mainstream offering that is Fresh Meat, in which Joe Thomas (Simon from The Inbetweeners as more or less the same character), Jack Whitehall and a range of highly talented lesser knowns are a group of misfit University of Manchester students thrown together in a run-down student flat after they missed out on living in halls.

Opening on one of the characters cooking a raw duck with a hairdryer, you might initially be fooled into thinking that Fresh Meat is a zany, offbeat look at the fabled madness of the lives of student living, but it soon turns into a pleasingly and sometimes depressingly accurate portrayal of the occasional highs and frequent lows of student life.

Replete with the stilted first conversations (“So, what A Levels did you do?”) and cringingly bad first-time sex that are so redolent of Freshers Week, Fresh Meat is clearly carrying on in the embarassing realism tradition championed by The Inbetweeners, instead of trying to make out that we're all implausibly well-toned, ever-shagging partay animals, a la Skins.

Stereotypes though most of the characters are – lippy working class girl Vod (Zawe Ashton), Josie (Kimberley Nixon), a small town girl eager to spread her wings, and arrogant public schoolboy JP (Whitehall) – they all show a hint of hidden depth that the writers (Jesse Armstrong and Sam Bain – Peep Show, The Thick of It) hopefully will open up as the series progresses.

Whitehall is the biggest surprise of the first episode: massively over-hyped stand-up though he may be, he is perfectly cast as JP. He gets most of the show's spectacularly crude lines (“I'm a vagina miner, baby”, “I don't need flavoured condoms. My cock tastes amazing...I imagine”), but still  manages to make the character well-rounded – a deeply insecure guy who hides beyond the macho facade that his public schooling has taught him to build.

The show is much of the same: on the surface of it, this is a crass, mildly amusing romp through first year at university but it could well be very much more: a long overdue look at the pressures and pains of being a student, with some cock jokes thrown in for good measure. Only time will tell.