21 Up · The Up Series
1977-05-09 · Michael Apted · 100 min
Tony Walker
The jockey dream had ended after a handful of races, and Tony had pivoted without self-pity to learning the Knowledge. The swagger was back, and Apted read it as a warning sign he would later apologise for.
Neil Hughes
At 21 the middle-class trajectory had collapsed: a university drop-out living in a London squat and labouring when he could. The interview is jittery and painful to watch.
Bruce Balden
Oxford confirmed Bruce's academic path but not his direction. He was the privileged participant least interested in privilege, still measuring himself against the missionary he had wanted to be.
Suzy Lusk (Suzanne Dewey)
21 Up is Suzy's most famous appearance: a disaffected, chain-smoking young woman who dismissed marriage, children and the film itself. It is the image she spent the rest of the series living against.
Nick Hitchon
The Dales farm boy had reached Oxford on merit — the series' clearest case of upward mobility. He was polite but openly ambivalent about being filmed.
Andrew Brackfield
At Cambridge, with a clear plan to qualify as a solicitor. Of the three Kensington boys he was the one whose trajectory never wavered.
John Brisby
An Oxford law scholar on the brink of a barrister's career. He left this film resolved not to be typecast again, and stayed away for the next one.
Charles Furneaux
The one Kensington boy who stepped off the expected track — Durham instead of Oxford, jeans instead of a suit — and who would make this his last on-camera appearance for nearly fifty years.
Jackie Bassett
A young wife with a bank job and a new-build home in Essex, defending an early marriage against an interviewer who plainly thinks it a mistake. The exchange about "enough men" is the moment she will still be angry about at 49 and 63.
Lynn Johnson
At 21 Lynn is already both married and doing the job she will keep for three decades, taking books to East End children in a mobile library. She is the one who most sharply rejects the film's assumption that the girls have been short-changed.
Sue Davis (later Sue Sullivan; Sue Fitzgerald from 2020)
At 21 Sue is the free one: unmarried, in an office job, saving for Australia, unbothered by the interviewer's either/or of career versus marriage. She takes the film's questions lightly where Jackie takes them hard.
Paul Kligerman
At 21 Paul was a long-haired young tradesman in Melbourne who had met Susan, the outgoing woman who would anchor the rest of his life. For the first time he sounded settled, telling the camera he had started to enjoy life. The film also brought him back together with Symon, the beginning of the friendship the series would keep tracking.
Symon Basterfield
At 21 Symon had a job in the freezer room of a sausage factory and a stated intention to move on, but no plan. He was protective of his fragile mother and had little sense of his own worth, answering 'no' when asked if he deserved more. The film reunited him with Paul, and he came across as gentler and better-dressed than anyone expected, but going nowhere in particular.
Peter Davies
At 21 Peter was a history undergraduate in London, articulate and idealistic, saying he did not want to drift through life without leaving a mark, even as the series would later characterise his university years as exactly that: drifting. He was the Liverpool boy who had made it to a degree while his friend Neil had dropped out. Liverpool FC's 1977 European Cup win stayed with him as a life highlight.