In advance, I confidently imagined that 70 Up would be the big programme of the week. In the event, it rather disappointingly felt more like the set-up for the big programme of next week. Or at least let’s hope so – because up to now we’ve had little of what many of us were anticipating with unusual keenness: the much-loved participants in one of British TV’s greatest achievements reflecting at 70 on lives that we’ve been following since whenever we first started watching grown-up telly.
The Up series famously began as a one-off documentary in 1964 about a carefully mixed bunch of 14 English seven-year-olds. Back then, its political agenda wasn’t hard to spot. While the posh kids – first seen singing ‘Waltzing Matilda’ in Latin – specified which Oxbridge college they’d be going to, a boy in a children’s home asked: ‘What’s a university?’
After Michael Apted made the game-changing decision to revisit these people every seven years, the programme’s overarching concern with class continued into their late twenties – and often played out much as you’d expect. Two of the three East-End girls were married by 19. The East End boy drove a black cab and radiated cockneyness. The poshos duly attended their chosen colleges and went on to successful careers and large houses.
There were, however, exceptions. Nick the farmer’s son became a nuclear scientist in America. Neil, a bright and scene-stealing charmer at seven, was in a squat at 21, homeless at 28 and showed up in a different place – even a different life – every time from then on, including as a Lib Dem councillor in Hackney and an Anglican lay minister in Cumbria.
But in all cases, the real benefit of the show’s decades-long commitment has been to make these people less like social emblems and more a set of individuals who between them have provided no less than a full-scale meditation on what constitutes a life well-lived.
For a few, this has taken the form of spectacular acts of goodness: Bruce dedicated years to teaching the underprivileged in Britain and Bangladesh; Symon, another boy who grew up in care, has fostered around 130 children. For most, it’s simply involved finding love and raising a family – which as meanings of life go, might sound somewhat mundane (and certainly would have done to the more ambitious of them when young), but turns out to reliably do the trick.
But, you may be thinking, all I’m doing is providing a recap of the story so far – my defence being that this is pretty much all Tuesday’s programme did too. Admittedly, editing Up must be among the toughest jobs in television: by now you’ve got nine previous series and still 11 people to remind viewers of. Nonetheless, I do wish that the new director, Asif Kapadia (Apted died in 2021), had brought us fully up to date on five or six participants in the first episode, leaving the rest for the second. As things stood, here we got only a whistlestop selection of greatest hits from all of them, and just the odd glimpse of their 70-year-old selves, with presumably the full reveal to follow.
True, these glimpses held the promise that what’s apparently the grand finale of the entire venture will be as poignant as we’d wish. In particular, we heard a few regrets of the kind that at this stage, needless to say, can never be put right. Andrew, for example, was briefly sighted questioning why on earth he’d thought work was so important when he could have been hanging out with his children. Symon wept about never finding out who his dad was, because he didn’t want to upset his late mum by asking her. We also saw that Neil, as he admits, still hasn’t managed to get to grips with his one and only life.
This remains one of the best things television has ever done
Unsurprisingly though, this drip-feeding was more tantalising than anything else. And while we waited in vain for more new stuff, there was time to heretically wonder about a couple of possible flaws in the Up project. Was the essentially toffs-and-tinkers casting too broadbrush? Was the sainted Apted too harsh in his interviews? (Several of the catch-up clips featured him putting it to the low-achievers that their lives were rubbish.)
Either way, of course, this remains one of the best things television has ever done – and rich proof of the truth of Anne Tyler’s observation that ‘the real adventure is the flow of time; it’s as much adventure as anyone could wish’. Now all we need is for 70 Up to actually show us what it’s like for the participants (by now something approaching old friends) to be 70. Fortunately, I suspect it won’t let us down.
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