Counting the cost
BBC comedy Spent marks the first original series from writer Michelle de Swarte, who also stars as a former model failing to face up to her new reality away from the catwalk. She and executive producer Jack Bayles tell DQ about how they partnered to create the six-part show.
Michelle de Swarte is in a hurry. The former fashion model-turned-stand-up comedian has only been screenwriting and acting for five years but has already appeared in Katherine Ryan’s Netflix series The Duchess and led the cast of HBO and Sky horror-comedy The Baby. Now she’s written her first original series, BBC half-hour Spent, in which she also plays the lead character.
“It’s been very fortuitous, for sure,” she tells DQ. “My friend was like, ‘How many auditions have you been to?’ I was like, ‘Well, I did the Netflix show with Katherine and I did The Baby – and I’d just started acting. I feel quite fortunate.”
Due to launch on BBC Two and BBC iPlayer later this year, Spent is partly inspired by de Swarte’s own life. She plays Mia, a former catwalk model who is used to the finer things in life. But with her career over, she’s now broke, homeless and sofa surfing on the verge of turning 40 and isn’t ready to face up to life living on the breadline.
Like Mia, de Swarte started modelling in her late teens and lived in the US for most of her adult life before moving back to the UK in 2019.
“I napalmed my life in a spectacular fashion and found myself moving back to London with nothing to show for all of my time working in fashion and all of the silly money I made along the way,” she says. “A succession of bad choices led me back to the UK, pushing 40. Drawing from that experience, I was able to make a whole world for Mia, and make some characters that are hopefully juicy and touch on a number of things that, regardless of whether you work in fashion or not, we’re all living with right now. Trying to live within your means when instant gratification gets in the way of long term stability.”
The series comes from Various Artists, where head of comedy Jack Bayles, a former Channel 4 commissioner, teamed up with de Swarte to develop a series after meeting her more than a decade earlier.
“She started out in stand-up so I tracked Michelle’s career while I was doing other things,” the executive producer recalls. Then, when he saw a short film she co-wrote and starred in, Voguing to Dancehall, he got in touch to discuss potentially working together. In particular, they were keen to explore how they were both “kids of consumerism,” with a ‘buy now, worry later’ mindset that meant they were intent on keeping the party going as long as possible.
“When we started chatting about it, it just felt like that was really fertile territory,” Bayles says. “Then, partly because she’s got this access to the world of modelling that feels totally unique to her, and she’s pretty funny about it, it was easier to get into how we make this more than just this story, and hopefully that’s what we’ve gone on to explore.”
As a stand-up comic, it was natural for de Swarte to consider writing a comedy for television. But she also wanted the London-set Spent to talk about issues that will resonate with the audience and “hopefully fire up a bit of emotion.”
“But the end game is to make you laugh, and not make it weighty and too heavy, whether it be a live audience member or a viewer,” she says of her work.
“After seeing Michelle’s short and the way she writes dialogue, there is a lot of naturalism to it. It lives in the real world,” Bayles says. “It’s not a slapstick show. It’s not surreal, it’s very naturalistic, so walking the line between how you get to those slightly deeper themes we are teasing while maintaining comic situations has been the real challenge of it.
“Everybody’s feeling the cost-of-living crisis, everybody slightly feels like the party’s over and we wanted to have that in it while not feeling too weighty. But at the same time, when someone’s had this high life, the idea that they wouldn’t want anybody to know they’ve lost it because that’s how they define themselves is a funny comic mechanism to maintain. It’s Keeping Up Appearances,” he adds, comparing Spent to the classic British sitcom. “That was a good comic engine for us to use while trying to build a wider world.”
De Swarte describes Mia as “avoidant and vacuous,” and someone who avoids emotional situations deeper than a puddle. But when she returns home, she’s pulled back towards her family and friends, who are all living in the real world with real problems.
“Mia’s tried to throw gifts at issues but actually what people want from her is time,” she notes. “That is very scary currency to engage with, because when you don’t, it says what you think about your own self-worth.”
“I really like the relationship she has with Jo, her best friend, because it’s like if Mia is the hare, Jo’s the tortoise,” Bayles says. “There’s this interesting thing where Mia’s still looking incredible, she’s wearing a fur coat, seemingly still part of this amazing life and Jo’s a nurse, with a mortgage and a long-term girlfriend, and you can see Mia’s panic.”
Across the six-episodes, Mia is then called upon to face a moment of enlightenment, but she remains resistant. “There are things that are forcing her hand to be a better person and it’s about how she handles that and tackles it,” de Swarte says.
But writing and starring in the series, which is directed by Alex Winckler (Somewhere Boy), de Swarte knew at some point she would have to finish tinkering with the scripts and focus on acting and learning her own lines. “And I’m in most scenes,” she acknowledges.
“You take for granted that because you’ve written it, you are going to know your part, but that’s not the case. Leading up to filming, we drew a really clear line, so once we crossed that line, we stopped with the writing process. There were little tweaks here and there, but we had it in the bag before we started.”
“There’s a tipping point in the process a couple of weeks out when you bring all of these people in and you go from two in a room to 70-strong, and everyone wants to know what they need to be doing and they’re looking in our direction,” Bayles continues. “It was also hard because it’s a big story. It’s a very ambitious show for a first-time writer.”
Now in post-production – four of its six episodes have been locked ahead of its launch later this year – the writer and actor has been involved across all aspects of a series that has adopted a ‘best idea wins’ mantra.
“This is my first show. I only started writing five years ago so everyone else has got a lot more experience than me. It’s interesting to hear people’s offerings and suggestions,” she says.
“There’s not loads I would do differently, because you don’t know your processes. What’s my process? I like coffee. Now I know the rhythm of how I write and how I would write a show, I can apply that moving forward. There are things about myself, especially with my writing process, that I understand a lot better now.”
But first and foremost, she is a stand-up comic and has no plans to put that side of her career on the backburner now she’s breaking into television. “I would never neglect that. I love it, and I love how instant it is. You’re a one-man band, whereas to write a show, you need a team and then another team, and there’s so many different layers and processes to get the thing done,” she says. “I will always continue to do stand-up and with acting, if someone wants someone with this accent, I’m happy to see what comes along.”
With BBC Studios distributing the series internationally and launching Spent to global buyers at its annual Showcase event in London, de Swarte also hopes viewers around the world will be able to resonate with Mia’s story.
“We’re living in a world now that is constantly in transition, we’re constantly moving. Rarely do you stay in the town or village or the city that you were born in,” she says. “So the thing about moving and then having to return to where you’re from is an international story that most people can relate to, whether you’ve moved to the next village, the next country or the next continent.
Bayles adds: “Who hasn’t decided to buy a new car or a new handbag or gone for a weekend away, spending money in the wrong place? Mia’s story is an extreme version of that, and particularly at this moment, this is a world that we’re familiar with.”
tagged in: BBC, HBO, Jack Bayles, Katherine Ryan, Michelle de Swarte, Netflix, Sky, Spent, The Baby, The Duchess