The disappointment of 70 Up (so far)
From our UK edition
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.
