Paul Kligerman · The Up Series, 7 to 70

Age 7 · 1964 · Seven Up!

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.

Say you had a wife and had to eat what they cooked you. And say I don't like greens, well I don't like greens.

What does a university mean?

• Resident of Shaftesbury Homes children's home in Twickenham; parents divorced, left in his father's care
• Filmed alongside Symon Basterfield, seen making his bed in the dormitory
• Asked the interviewer what a university was
• Said he did not want to marry in case his wife made him eat greens

Age 14 · 1970 · 7 Plus Seven

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.

• About a year after Seven Up! his father and stepmother emigrated with him and his brother to Australia, settling in the Melbourne area
• Struggled badly with confidence and with expressing his feelings on camera

Age 21 · 1977 · 21 Up

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.

Things have fallen into line and everything. And I've started to enjoy life.

• Living in Australia with long hair and a girlfriend, Susan (Sue), whom he would marry in 1978
• Working in the building trade in Melbourne
• Said things had fallen into line and he had started to enjoy life
• Reunited on film with Symon, his friend from the children's home

Age 28 · 1984 · 28 Up

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.

• Married to Susan since 1978; the couple had set off on a long road trip around Australia's outback
• Working as a bricklayer in the Melbourne area (Wikipedia's film page places him at a sign-making company; sources differ, uncertain)
• Susan said she loved him for his helplessness, and joked about his cute little bum in shorts
• Susan's confidence was already visibly compensating for his own

Age 35 · 1991 · 35 Up

At 35 Paul was running his own bricklaying business in Melbourne and raising two children with Susan. Granada paid to fly him back to England for filming, one of several trips the series funded that also let him rebuild contact with his estranged mother. He was steady but still doubted himself, and Susan continued to be the more confident half of the couple.

• Bricklayer in Melbourne who had set up his own small business
• Still married to Susan, raising their two children (daughter Katy and a son)
• Granada flew him back to England for the filming
• Confidence and self-doubt remained his recurring struggle

Age 42 · 1998 · 42 Up

Paul at 42 was a working man in Melbourne whose marriage had lasted twenty years and whose life had changed little on the surface; published accounts of this instalment are thin. Sometime in this period he gave up bricklaying for a job with a sign-making company. His wife later credited the series itself with helping keep their marriage together.

• Still in the Melbourne area with Susan and the two children; little specific detail is documented for this film
• Left bricklaying at some point in these years for work at a sign-making company
• Regular UK filming trips helped him reconnect with his mother

Age 49 · 2005 · 49 Up

At 49 Paul was employed by a sign-making firm and had been married to Susan for more than a quarter of a century. The film's set piece for him was the trip Granada paid for back to England to see Symon, the friend from the dormitory, now a foster father. Two men from the same children's home compared lives across the world.

• Working for a sign-making company in Melbourne
• Granada funded his return to England to visit Symon; their reunion was filmed
• Still married to Susan; two children grown

Age 56 · 2012 · 56 Up

At 56 Paul and Susan worked side by side at a retirement village, he as the handyman looking after the small units and gardens. He was a grandfather five times over, and his daughter Katy had become the first Kligerman to attend university, the thing he could not even define at seven. He seemed content and, for the first time, not to be fighting his own self-doubt.

• Working with Susan at a retirement village in Melbourne's eastern suburbs, doing odd jobs and maintaining the units and gardens
• Still married; five grandchildren
• Daughter Katy was the first in the family to go to university

Age 63 · 2019 · 63 Up

At 63 Paul was still the retirement-village handyman, married to Susan for over forty years and surrounded by grandchildren. The instalment's emotional centre for him was Symon's first visit to Australia: two boys from the same children's home, now grandfathers, talking about the confidence they never had and the families they built anyway. Michael Apted, filming what would be his last instalment, gave the reunion pride of place.

• Still working at the retirement village with Susan; a grandfather
• Symon and his wife Vienetta were flown to Australia to visit him, their first visit, 55 years after the shared dormitory
• The two men reflected on the lack of confidence they had both carried, and on how their childhoods shaped them as fathers and grandfathers

Age 70 · 2026 · 70 Up

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.

You need a good family. You need it for yourself and you need it to make your life whole... learn to be kind to other people and forgive them for their failings.

• Appeared in the two-part finale 70 Up (ITV1/ITVX, 15 and 22 September 2026, directed by Asif Kapadia) as a grandfather still living in Australia
• Still married to Susan after more than four decades; shown doting on his grandchildren
• His father had died about ten years earlier; Paul said he 'did the best he did and… did a good job', and learned his father had himself spent time in a children's home after his own parents' divorce
• Had repaired his once-estranged relationship with his mother, helped by the trips back to the UK that filming required
• Offered his summing-up: a good family, kindness and forgiveness are what matter