28 Up · The Up Series
1984-11-20 · Michael Apted · 136 min
Tony Walker
Tony at 28 was the series' surprise: a working cabbie, a husband and father, visibly happy. The suspicion of 21 Up had not come true.
Neil Hughes
28 Up is the film that made Neil the emotional centre of the series: a homeless man on the edge of Scotland, lucid about his own fragility. Viewers wrote in asking if he was still alive.
Bruce Balden
Bruce had chosen the East End over the City — the closest available version of his missionary calling. His idealism was intact; his loneliness was becoming a theme.
Suzy Lusk (Suzanne Dewey)
The transformation between 21 and 28 is among the most striking in the series: the cynic had become a settled wife and mother who was, for the first time on camera, at ease. Asked what had changed her, she looked at Rupert.
Nick Hitchon
Newly emigrated to Madison, Wisconsin, as a young academic with a doctorate and a wife who was also building a career. The couple's frank interview drew a hostile audience reaction that shaped Jackie's later absence.
Andrew Brackfield
A young City solicitor, newly married. Jane's unpretentious presence began to soften the film's picture of him.
Jackie Bassett
Stable and married, childless by choice, and still filmed as one-third of a group. 28 Up gives Jackie little individual screen time — her life looks settled.
Lynn Johnson
The most settled of the three: a happy marriage, two daughters and a vocation rather than a job. Her love of children's librarianship is the emotional centre of her 28 Up appearance.
Sue Davis (later Sue Sullivan; Sue Fitzgerald from 2020)
Sue has taken the conventional path later than her friends: married at 24, a young son, no job. 28 Up shows her contented and, as ever, given little individual screen time.
Paul Kligerman
At 28 Paul was a married bricklayer whose marriage to Susan was the visible centre of his life; the couple had packed up and driven across the Australian outback. Susan did much of the talking, affectionately describing his helplessness, and the film presented them as complementary opposites. He was still a worker with little money, but a settled one.
Symon Basterfield
At 28 Symon was a family man with five children and the same freezer-room job, and he made no apology for either. The film showed a warm, encouraging father who measured success by the thing he had lacked: his children had a dad. He had chosen ease over ambition, and said so.
Peter Davies
At 28 Peter was a married comprehensive-school teacher in Leicester, underpaid and angry about what was being done to state education, and he said so about Margaret Thatcher's government in the bluntest terms the series had ever broadcast. The tabloid backlash that followed made him the series' first casualty of fame: he was vilified as an angry young red and walked away. It was the last the cameras saw of him until 2012.