Guardian writer Stuart Heritage looks back on his time as a fresher

Self-proclaimed “Charlie Bucket lookalike” Stuart Heritage is one of the It’s Nice That team’s favourite writers. Working primarily for The Guardian, Stu’s now famous live-blogs embrace television black-holes such as The X Factor, First Dates and Gogglebox and put a carefree, humorous spin on footage that could otherwise make you lose faith in mankind. His observational humour is what’s got him where he is today, so we knew he’d be the perfect candidate to speak tellingly bout his days as a wide-eyed, floppy-haired Fresher. To read more of Stu’s writing, you can find it over here.

Stuart Heritage

I don’t know this person. I know all the people around him – I lived with them, in fact – but he’s a total mystery. You know the one I’m talking about. The one who’s skinnier than me. The one who hasn’t started to lose his hair yet. The one who’s wearing a barcode on his chest because deep down we’re all, like, “products,” man. The one who very clearly doesn’t have a clue.

My main recollection of Freshers’ Week is that everyone was much better briefed than me. They knew what to expect from university. I didn’t. I remain the only person from my family to have attended uni, and my school was so unanimously crap that its post-graduation resources basically amounted to a shrug and a wink. This, I tell myself with the benefit of retrospect, is why I didn’t get a very good degree.

It’s not, of course. I didn’t get a very good degree because I didn’t do a very good degree. I’ve got a degree in Scriptwriting for Film and Television which, in real terms, is about as useful as having a degree in Moonbeams and Rainbow-Farts. No movie producer has ever bought a script on the understanding that the writer has a degree in it; and nobody has ever knowingly hired anyone with a scriptwriting degree, because they know that they’re looking at the CV of someone who spent three years wanking on about the mise-en-scene of The Maltese Falcon in the mistaken belief that it actually meant anything.

Whatever scraps I learned from university had precious little to do with my actual course. I learned how to pour a pint. I learned to leave house parties the second that anyone either a) gets out an acoustic guitar or b) listens to Stairway to Heaven. I learned that being in a roomful of Film Studies students is roughly about as much fun as being in a roomful of carbon monoxide and quicksand. I’ve learned, since being at university, that I could have achieved everything in my life three years earlier by just writing people lots of nice letters instead of actually packing up all my shit and going to bloody Bournemouth.

The guy in the photos doesn’t know any of this yet, though. If my calculations are correct, he’s currently quite excited by the prospect of going to see a Stereophonics tribute band in a crap nightclub that’s a 45-minute bus ride from his house. I don’t know who he is, but I really don’t envy him.

Back to School
Throughout the month of October we’ll be celebrating the well-known autumnal feeling of Back to School. The content this month will be focusing on fresh starts, education, learning tools and the state of art school in the world today – delivered to you via fantastic in-depth interviews, features and conversations with talented, relevant, creative people.