7 Plus Seven · The Up Series
1970-12-15 · Michael Apted · 53 min
Tony Walker
By fourteen Tony had already left school for a stable apprenticeship, the first step toward the jockey career he had wanted since seven. On camera, though, the exuberance had gone quiet.
Neil Hughes
The transformation between 7 and 14 is one of the most-discussed in the series: the hopeful boy had turned into a stressed, anxious adolescent. It was the first sign of the mental-health struggles that would shape his adult life.
Bruce Balden
Bruce at 14 was shy, thoughtful and already a little apart from his peers in his values. The faith and social concern were intact; the self-confidence was not.
Suzy Lusk (Suzanne Dewey)
The confident little girl had become a guarded teenager in the middle of her parents' divorce. Her hostility to the films began here and never entirely left.
Nick Hitchon
Away at grammar school in Skipton, an awkward teenager who had left the farm behind mentally and was set on science. He resented the second round of filming.
Andrew Brackfield
At Charterhouse on schedule, a polite and somewhat stiff public-school boy whose life was unfolding as scripted at seven.
John Brisby
A confident, politically minded Westminster boy. What the film did not show was that his father was dead and the family's money was tighter than the 'posh boy' framing implied.
Charles Furneaux
At Marlborough on schedule, already uneasy with the role the series had assigned him.
Jackie Bassett
A cheerful teenager at a comprehensive, already uneasy with being asked mainly about marriage and babies. The seeds of her later quarrel with Apted are visible here.
Lynn Johnson
A grammar-school girl set slightly apart from her comprehensive-school friends, watchful and defensive on camera. The film treats her, like them, as a future housewife.
Sue Davis (later Sue Sullivan; Sue Fitzgerald from 2020)
A cheerful comprehensive-school teenager, conciliatory in the group interview while Lynn is prickly. No sign yet of ambition beyond the ordinary.
Paul Kligerman
By 14 Paul's life had been uprooted: the family had emigrated to Australia soon after the first film and he was growing up around Melbourne. On screen he was shy and inarticulate, and confidence was already the theme the series would keep returning to with him. He remembered England as a place where it seemed to be raining all the time.
Symon Basterfield
At 14 Symon was living with his mother for the first time in years and openly missed the children's home where everyone had been his friend. Asked repeatedly about his absent father, he insisted it did not affect him, a line the series would revisit for fifty years. His stated ambition was already the one he would fulfil: to be a good father.
Peter Davies
At 14 Peter was a Liverpool schoolboy on a conventional academic track, still paired on screen with Neil. Published accounts of 7 Plus Seven say almost nothing specific about him; he was the participant whose life was, at this stage, going to plan. The contrast with Neil's later unravelling is what gives this pairing its retrospective weight.