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TV’s most fascinating experiment ends with an emotional gut-punch

70 Up brings to a close one of the most fascinating – and arguably the longest-running – shows in the annals of TV history. It started in 1964 with a group of 14 children from a cross-section of English society in the documentary Seven Up! It was there we met Cockney lad Tony, who at age seven planned to be a jockey; headstrong Jackie, who said she would marry a boy with money; and Paul, who was raised in a boy’s home and in reply to a question about his future education replied, “What’s a university?”

Every seven years since, director and behind-the-camera interviewer Michael Apted returned to see how these playful children became feisty teenagers, then parents and eventually grandparents; how marriages were made and unmade; how hopes soared and were sometimes extinguished.

TV’s most fascinating experiment ends with an emotional gut-punch

70 Up brings to a close one of the most fascinating – and arguably the longest-running – shows in the annals of TV history. It started in 1964 with a group of 14 children from a cross-section of English society in the documentary Seven Up! It was there we met Cockney lad Tony, who at age seven planned to be a jockey; headstrong Jackie, who said she would marry a boy with money; and Paul, who was raised in a boy’s home and in reply to a question about his future education replied, “What’s a university?”

Every seven years since, director and behind-the-camera interviewer Michael Apted returned to see how these playful children became feisty teenagers, then parents and eventually grandparents; how marriages were made and unmade; how hopes soared and were sometimes extinguished.

Examined lives • Jane Goodall

In the early 1960s, contentious talk about the injustices of the British class system was part of the stock-in-trade of Manchester pubs. Most of the talk was washed away by pints of Watney’s Red Barrel but occasionally something sparked, as when Granada Television producer Tim Hewat, after denouncing a social divide that “stinks to heaven” asked, “how are we going to dramatise it?”

Never one to avoid answering his own questions, Hewat, a maverick innovator who had risen to the executive ranks in his early thirties, came up with an idea that departed from the standard documentary approach of interviewing officials and professional commentators. Why not talk to the children whose lives were being mapped out for them before they had a chance to speak for themselves?

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