Uplifting comedy BBC2 drama with Michelle de Swarte on a catwalk queen experencing hard times
Monday: Spent (BBC2, 10pm)
However, apart from a few supermodels, it’s not exactly a career known for its longevity, so what do you do if you find yourself out of a job the best part of four decades before your official retirement age?
Well, Michelle De Swarte, who moved from South London to New York after being scouted at 19, graced catwalks from many of the major design house, and appeared in numerous fashion magazines, decided to transition to stand-up comedy.
And now she’s drawing on her experiences for the new sitcom Spent. Not only did she create the series, but she also plays the lead role of Mia, a model who returns home to London after falling on hard times.
Michelle says: “What inspired me to create this series was having spent years working in the fashion industry, I would get together with my other friends who also modelled and we would sit down and share all of these stories about this ‘fall from grace’ that we’d all experienced, really – we would cackle and laugh! And I hadn’t seen that many examples of that in a show before.
“You see a lot of shows about trying to break into the fashion industry, but you don’t see that many shows about what happens when you’re spat out the other end, and there are so many interesting, funny, embarrassing, heartfelt stories about what happens on the other side.”
It might not sound like the most relatable premise, but Michelle points out that people may discover they have more in common with her character than they first thought. Although she came from humble beginnings, Mia’s high-flying career has given her a taste for the finer things in life, which she’s now struggling to afford.
Michelle says: “I don’t know about you, but like, who doesn’t have an Amazon account? Who has not sat in their house in the morning, hearing the front doorbell go and thought, ‘Oh, my God. What is that?!’, only to be reminded that you bought a fur coat, a stapler, and a tongue scraper at 3am… That feels universal and relatable, we are all attempting to fill a void with ‘stuff’.And she also feels that the advent of social media means that many people are more familiar than they might think with the pressure of keeping up appearances.
Michelle says: “In a time where everyone’s stuntin’ for Instagram, in a time where everyone has this online persona, I feel like Mia’s a few years ahead with that, because she modelled and now we all model in one way or another.
“We all find our best lighting, and we all show ourselves to the best of our ability with the tools that we have. This is a show very much about the detriment of doing that.”
In the first episode, Mia hopes a potential modelling job will help to rescue her from her financial problems, but is there a catch?