Hit me baby one more time

OK freshers, it’s time for a reality check. If you haven’t already established that life ain’t what you thought it was going to be like at Warwick, I’m afraid I’ve got bad news for you. You might think that you’re living with the perfect set of hallmates now, but give it a week and one of them will snap. Back in my salad days, my token crazy hallmate thought it would be a good idea to fill the entire fridge with large silver bowls of soaking chick peas. One of my friend’s doors got smeared with shit.

You’re living with a group of strangers who may or may not decide to shower once every few days, may or may not be socially defective and may or may not have any sort of clue how they’re going to cope within the plastic coating of the Warwick bubble without their mummies by their sides. Your housemates, more likely than not, will have domestic abilities that equal those of the brown-throated three-toed sloth.

You’ll probably be lucky enough to fall prey to the freshers’ curse of thinking that it’s bare cool blud to get tanked on Lambrusco at 10am every morning without realising that, to the more stagnant members of the student population, you look like a prize turnip. If you went on a gap year, you’ll probably also think that laughing about your ‘vomcanoes’ in an ironic fashion is hilarious, when in actual fact everyone knows that you’re barely disguising your vapid bragging about saving orphans in some unnamed third world country with outdated, overused and sloppy humour.

If you’re male, you’re probably under the impression that University is a great place to either lose your virginity or to carry on your Summer Holiday wet spell of having sex with that one drunk girl who you met in a suburban night club. University, we are led to believe, is a promised land. It’s full of glamazons who are old enough to embrace their sexuality to the extent that they will probably have sex with every quiff-haired adolescent who offers to buy them half a pint of cider black. Hopes are no doubt raised by the carrier bags of condoms the SU will gift you during Freshers week. Well boys, for the vast majority of you the pre-freshers wet dreams are just going to be an illusion.

Which, of course, brings me to _Babestation_. If you want to have the full freshers experience without having to pay for a university education, meet any new people or peel your flabby arse from the sofa, then you ought to watch _Babestation_. _Babestation_ is a TV channel that is inexplicably still on air. The premise of the entire channel is that lonely men (who I can only assume have a place on the sex offenders register) phone women with the class of Chloe Mafia and the looks of a partially deflated sex doll and get them to enact their deepest, darkest fantasies. If their deepest, darkest fantasies involve watching a mum of three gyrating unconvincingly, licking her shoes and bouncing her sagging implants, then _Babestation_ fulfils its purpose.

I imagine that the men who are desperate enough to pay five pounds a minute to speak to someone who looks like they’ve got the intellectual prowess of a Magikarp might be hoping for a bit more than a half-assed simulation of what might happen in a theoretical session of slap and tickle.

_Babestation’s_ economy is driven by fantasy in its crudest form. It’s basically Prostitution TV. The women are obscene cartoon forms of an angst-ridden teenage boy’s infantile fantasies. They’re what Jessica Rabbit would be if she became a crack addict. _Babestation_ presents the brutal face of the average adult’s sexual reality: that the pursuit of an impossible fantasy is often disappointing, expensive and, well, just that. Impossible.

The men who peruse the babes of _Babestation_ probably avert their attention away from the fact that it’s filmed in the spare room of some council flat in Bognor Regis. For some reason, their writhing appears to maintain the attention of something that vaguely ressembles an audience. It limbers on.

And you will too, freshers. The prospect of three years of University might still be glimmering like Midas’ daughter, but soon enough it will be dulled. You’ll be rejected by the ugliest girl in the Copper Rooms, learn to hate your course and won’t be able to wait to leave. Welcome to Warwick, where dreams are crushed.