Michelle de Swarte is ebullient. With her Cheshire Cat grin, swaggering accent and explosion of gorgeous curls, it’s impossible to take your eyes off her – no wonder she used to be a model. After being scouted at 19, De Swarte lived the high life in New York and Paris before spending all her money and ending up homeless back in Brixton. It’s those post-modelling years that provide the inspiration for her new sitcom Spent.
As well as writing the series, De Swarte stars as Mia, a heightened version of herself with very little self-awareness who arrives back in London after her unchecked spending left her bankrupt in the US. Not to worry – Mia has a dangerous trust that everything will be alright in the end. Nature will take its course “like a David Attenborough documentary”, she tells her oldest friend Jo (Amanda Wilkin).
Mia takes little responsibility for her spending but also refuses to reach out for help, surreptitiously couch surfing or staying awake all night, suitcase at her feet, before she gifts enough freebies to a hostel receptionist to convince her to stay in a dorm for a few nights’ kip. Over six episodes she gets into all sorts of scrapes – dog-sitting for a posh woman who orders Mia to send pictures of her dalmatian’s excrement, saving a 15-year-old model from the clutches of a pervy businessman, interrupting (and subsequently making friends with) some retirement-age doggers. It’s fun – but not much more.
De Swarte has rich experience to mine for Spent and I had hoped some of that insight on homelessness and the fickle fashion industry would crop up in the series. But much of the series plays out like a sequence of half-baked ideas rather than a series with a coherent narrative thread. It’s frustrating how often it touches on deeper themes – poor financial education, identity politics, the struggles that come with having a parent with poor mental health – yet doesn’t dare to delve further.
Not all comedy has to be worthy or say something profound (just look at the excellent Things You Should Have Done or Stath Lets Flats), but since we see the world through Mia’s self-involved, superficial eyes (she rarely gets through a conversation without commenting on how good someone’s skin looks), the world of Spent is glibber than it should be.
What’s really lacking is any meaty comment on the modelling or fashion industry that chews up young girls and spits them out once they are no longer in vogue. Mia has clearly been damaged by her time in the business – she’d rather take cocaine to fuel a three-hour walk across London than get public transport – but Spent makes little to no effort to interrogate why she ended up as a borderline narcissist.
Asking us to root for a character who is so reluctant to acknowledge her own irresponsible role in her money problems is an uphill battle – especially when there are millions of British families struggling to make ends meet. It’s hard to feel sorry for Mia when she is gifted a rare and expensive perfume by an old modelling mate, which she can then use to barter her way into a bed for the night. Still, as the series goes on it’s impossible not to warm to her – such is De Swarte’s charm – and, if you make it to the end, you’ll be shouting at the TV with every bad decision she makes.
Spent is an easy watch – far easier than it ought to be. It feels as though De Swarte had a wealth of complex, thorny ideas that ended up being squashed and compartmentalised into a blasé comedy (though the laughs are few and far between) about a spoiled brat who is no longer rich. What a shame.
‘Spent’ is streaming on BBC iPlayer. Episode one is on BBC Two tonight at 10pm.