70 Up · The Up Series
2026-09-15 and 2026-09-22 (Tuesdays 9pm, ITV1 + ITVX) · Asif Kapadia · 180 min
Tony Walker
Seventy and still married to the woman he wed in 1979, Tony closed the series where he began — on horses. The regret he named was not the affair or the lost bar but the riding he stopped at 21.
Neil Hughes
The final film found Neil alone in rural France, lonely at times but 'as happy as I probably could be'. He had outlasted homelessness, held office for two decades, and ended the series speaking for others who live with mental illness.
Bruce Balden
The final film found Bruce retired on the Northumberland coast, still serving others in a choir and a lifeboat crew. He endorsed the series' Jesuit premise, and he was the best evidence for it.
Suzy Lusk (Suzanne Dewey)
Suzy came back to close the circle on her own terms, naming what had driven her away and what the films had got wrong about her. At 70 she measured her life against friends already gone and found herself lucky.
Nick Hitchon · remembered (after their death)
Nick did not live to be 70; 70 Up carries the interview he asked to give while dying of throat cancer, three years before broadcast. Frail and honest to the end, he said the series had been 'tremendously important' to him and that he would miss it, and named his son's birth as the purest joy of his life.
Andrew Brackfield
At 70 Andrew is the series' quiet constant: retired, still married to Jane, proud of his sons and candid that his career cost him time with them. Having never missed a film, he closed by praising the very continuity he had embodied.
John Brisby
With Apted dead and the series ending, John said on camera, in his own words, why he had refused the director's interviews since 35 Up — a condition Apted himself had acknowledged in 2019: he had never liked him, and the 'posh boy' of 1964 was an edit, not a person. Still a barrister at 4 Stone Buildings, he remained devoted to Bulgaria and to setting the record straight.
Charles Furneaux · voice only
After 49 years of silence, Charles returned to the series on his own terms — as a voice over photographs that hide his face. The documentary-maker explained the refusal that had defined his place in the films: he believed Apted had cast the children in roles, and he had spent his career filming other people rather than being filmed.
Jackie Bassett
The finale finds Jackie, against all the series' expectations, at peace: out of Scotland and on a Norfolk beach with a new partner and a gym membership, saying life has got 'a lot easier'. She gets the last word on the questions she has fought for half a century, and ends it herself.
Lynn Johnson · remembered (after their death)
The finale closes the East End trio as a pair: Jackie and Sue remember Lynn, thirteen years after her death. She remains the series' emblem of a modest, useful life fully lived.
Sue Davis (later Sue Sullivan; Sue Fitzgerald from 2020)
The finale gives Sue the ending she declined for twenty years — a wedding — plus retirement, Essex, and a late run of caring for her parents. She closes the series as its steadiest working-class woman, amused rather than angry at what it once expected of her.
Paul Kligerman
At 70 Paul was where the series had left him: in Australia, married to Susan, surrounded by grandchildren, a working man still. He spoke of his late father, whom he had come to understand as another children's-home boy, and of the mother he had reconciled with. His closing advice, about family, kindness and forgiving people their failings, read as the moral of the life the cameras had watched since the dormitory in Twickenham.
Symon Basterfield
At 70 Symon was the series' great quiet achievement: the boy from the home had, with Vienetta, fostered well over a hundred children and built a home full of family and foster kids. What broke through was the unfinished business with his father: at 14 he had said it made no difference, and at 70 he broke down over never having asked. He faced death with equanimity, calling it an open door to somewhere else.
Peter Davies
At 70 Peter was a novelist and working musician in south Liverpool, and 70 Up let him say something the earlier films never had: that he had struggled with depression for much of his life. He looked back on the 1984 furore without rancour, admitted the mercenary motive for coming back had paid off, and said the arc of humanity was still going the right way.