Break Clause: Why living with an ex because of the housing crisis is more common than you think

Most long-time renters boast one or two horror stories: black mould, precipitous rent increases, omnipresent yet neglectful landlords.

In comedian Lara Ricote’s case, the list of rental hazards also includes ‘bad lasagna’ and ‘false accusations of theft.’

“This is maybe too long of a story,” she tells Big Issue over Zoom. But it is relevant. The Mexican American comedian is starring in the new Channel 4 sitcom Break Clause, playing one half of a couple who break up immediately after moving into their new flat – so I’ve asked Ricote, and co-star Samuel Bottomley, for their worst rental experiences.

“So when I first moved to Amsterdam…” Ricote begins.

Ricote is now an established and much loved figure on the UK comedy circuit. Her credits include Mitchell & Webb Are Not Helping, Make That Movie, Live At The Apollo and Would I Lie To You?, and when she speaks to Big Issue she’s fresh off a month at the Edinburgh Fringe, where her show Inkling was nominated for the best show comedy award.

Back in 2018, though, she was a would-be politics student moving to the Netherlands, and her most pressing concern was finding a place to live.

“I put on the, whatever, ‘Mexicans in Amsterdam’ group chat, like ‘hey somebody help!'” Ricote says. “There was one lady who was like you can come over.”

“I went with my mom because my mom was helping me look for stuff and she made us a lasagna… and it sucked.

“It was some of the crispiest lasagna. There was no sauce in it. It was basically like really crispy lasagna, and we were like, “Wow, delicious! This is the perfect lasagna!’… [When I got the room] I had to eat the lasagna on Fridays because I lied through my teeth and said it was good.” She pauses. “And it wasn’t good.”

Weekly bad lasagna might not seem, on a sliding scale of rental indignities, like the worst outcome. But the landlady also wouldn’t let Ricote have visitors over to her ‘tiny and expensive’ attic room. Ultimately, she accused the comedian of theft and evicted her.

“She told me that I stole her Rolex Cartier. She said both [Rolex and Cartier],” Ricote recalls. “I told my mum and she was like, there’s no such thing. I think… she wanted to keep my deposit.”

“It was like so crazy. In the end I had to put the next room that I lived in on Airbnb to pay for the deposit. I would sleep with my roommate in the same bed, and then just rent out my room again and again because it was like two months’ rent that she took.”

Renting: it’s not for wimps. This is perhaps the moral of Ricote’s story, and also of the new sitcom.

In Break Clause, Ben (Bottomley) cheats on Lil (Ricote) – but by the time he tells her, they’ve already signed their lease agreement. The funny, moving story that results might hit quite close to home for some viewers. A 2022 study by Zoopla found that a third of couples who break up stay living together for around a year, and according to a 2024 study by Manchester Metropolitan University, it’s an increasingly common scenario in the “context of the housing crisis.” The lingering effects of austerity and post-pandemic upheaval make matters worse.

Since the show was first imagined as a short pilot in 2024, the government has passed the Renters’ Rights Act, which came into force in May and abolished fixed-term tenancies altogether – taking break clauses with them, and leaving tenants free to give two months’ notice at any point. But the rental market remains difficult, and there are still financial incentives for broken up couples to stick out the arrangement – despite the interpersonal drama.

Bottomley – an actor who starred in the 2023 film How To Have Sex, and featured alongside Daniel Day-Lewis in Anemone in 2025 – hasn’t endured this situation himself (in fact, he’s been with his girlfriend since they were both 16, and still has the cinema ticket stubs from their first date). But several people on set had.

“There were … one or two [guys] who actually were working on the show, crew members, and they were like, “Yeah, I had to do that… we split up. We had to live together,” Bottomley says. “When you really think about it, like, what do you do? You split up. Things don’t just change immediately, do they?”

Writer Jess Bray really captured the difficulties attendant to this modern living arrangement, said Bottomley.

“She’s really good at writing real life situations, you know, where people are like genuinely upset and shouting and arguing with each other, and then there will just be like – comedy,” he says.

Ricote herself had actually just gone through a break up when they started filming Break Clause. She wasn’t living with her partner – instead moving in with Mitchell and Webb co-star comedian Charly Clive, whose house “always has a room for someone going through a break up.” But much of the filming hit pretty close to home.

Read more:

• Rents in the UK are at record highs. Will they keep going up?
• Will chancellor John Healey unfreeze local housing allowance at the autumn budget?
• The Renters’ Rights Act is finally here. Here’s what is changing for tenants and landlords

“Yeah, it felt like I could either think of it like, “What the hell? I’m pissed off. This is the worst, or like, “What a gift from my life that I can just really process this now,” she says. “I’m going to have to process it anyway. I’m going to process it until I die. Of course, it was a big relationship. It was a six year relationship.”

“I was like… I can either let myself engage with the fact that this is happening, or I can try to, I guess, disassociate. But why would I do that? It felt like this is an opportunity for me to cry at my job.”

In the series, Lil and Ben navigate the ups and downs of their relationship breakdown within spitting distance of one another. As the viewer, you don’t know whether you want them to get back together or not – and that’s kind of the point, says Ricote. She’s philosophical about the show’s deeper message.

“I think there’s something about like the quickness of everything nowadays. It’s just like gone, cut from my life, and never see you again. And like, and you don’t have to. You can ghost someone and you never have to see them again.”

The lease forces the couple to deal with what’s actually happened.

“This is like – live with what has happened. Live with stuff and look at each other while you while it’s happening. And there’s an opportunity there. For actual growth. If you have time to be able to engage with what you did and look at this person and say, okay, we’re not only one action, but we’re like a collection of actions,” Ricote says. “We’re continuous people.”

Extrapolate out, and it’s not just flats: “we are all stuck together on this earth… this is the world we’ve got. Let’s make it nice for all of us because we’re all here together.”

It’s a good philosophy to hold onto if you’re stuck in a rental you don’t want to be in – or, perhaps, in a breakup you didn’t expect. And Ricote seems to have carried some of that generosity into her own rental horror story, too. Despite being accused of stealing a watch and losing two months’ rent, she remains surprisingly fond of her former landlady: “We had a good relationship. We would go to the movies holding arms.”

Break Clause is on Channel 4 from 10pm on 1 October and on channel4.com.

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