Seven Up! · The Up Series
1964-05-05 · Paul Almond · 40 min
Tony Walker
A working-class East End boy bursting with energy, Tony was the film's most physical child. His single, certain ambition was to ride racehorses.
Neil Hughes
Neil was the child everyone remembers from Seven Up!: bright-eyed, articulate, endlessly hopeful. Nothing in 1964 hinted at what came next.
Bruce Balden
The gentlest child in the film, Bruce combined a boarding-school upbringing with an unusually early social conscience and an ache for an absent father. His missionary ambition became the moral through-line of his life.
Suzy Lusk (Suzanne Dewey)
Suzy at seven was the series' picture of privilege: ballet, a London day school, a country estate and an assumption of nannies. The camera would return to that assumption for decades.
Nick Hitchon
A serious, blunt-fringed farm boy from a remote Dales valley, chosen to stand for rural Britain. He already had an appetite for science and flatly declined to discuss girls.
Andrew Brackfield
The archetypal privileged seven-year-old, mapping out a public-school and Cambridge future with total confidence. His newspaper line became the most quoted moment of the first film.
John Brisby
Presented as the small Tory of the film — precocious, certain, and defending private education at seven. He later said this edit made him look like 'an awful little prig' and set him up as the bogeyman of the class system.
Charles Furneaux
The quietest of the three prep-school boys, grouped for life with two classmates he did not consider friends. The Marlborough prediction held; the Oxford one did not.
Jackie Bassett
Jackie is the chatterbox of the three East End girls, treated by the filmmakers as a unit rather than as individuals. The film frames them as the working-class children whose future is assumed to be early marriage and motherhood.
Lynn Johnson
Lynn is the reserved member of the East End trio, with the humblest ambition of anyone in the film — a shop job at Woolworths. Nothing at seven predicts the career she will build.
Sue Davis (later Sue Sullivan; Sue Fitzgerald from 2020)
Sue is the sunny one of the East End trio. Seven Up! treats her, like her friends, as a working-class girl whose life is already mapped out.
Paul Kligerman
At seven Paul was a small, anxious boy in a charity home, the product of a messy divorce, with no idea what a university was and a fear of wives who serve greens. He and Symon were the series' two children's-home boys, the bottom rung of its class ladder. His worry about greens became one of the most quoted lines of the whole series.
Symon Basterfield
Symon was the series' most disadvantaged starting point: a mixed-race boy in a charity home in a Britain where that alone marked him out, with no father and a mother too depressed to raise him. He was gentle and barely audible, and his answer about the future, that he would just walk around and see what he could find, was quietly heartbreaking. He and Paul were placed together as the bottom of the class ladder the film set out to test.
Peter Davies
Peter was one of the two Liverpool suburban boys, filmed with his friend Neil as the series' middle-class control group between the East End and the prep schools. He wanted to be an astronaut and dismissed university as irrelevant to that plan. He came across as bright, bouncy and unremarkable, which was rather the point.