See You in Seven

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Seven threads · The Up Series

Class: is the path set at seven?

The founding thesis. Largely borne out at the top: Andrew and John went from the Kensington pre-prep to Cambridge, Oxford and the law; but Charles, from the same classroom, failed Oxford and went to Durham. Nick and Neil are the great exceptions in both directions.

  • Andrew Brackfield · Age 21: Undergraduate at Trinity College, Cambridge (Trinity College rather than the Trinity Hall he named at 7)
  • John Brisby · Age 21: Reading law at Christ Church, Oxford (1974–1977), as a scholar
  • Charles Furneaux · Age 21: Reading Modern History at Durham University (2:1, graduated 1978) after failing to get into Oxford
  • Nick Hitchon · Age 21: Reading physics at Merton College, Oxford — the moment the class prediction of the series broke.
  • Neil Hughes · Age 21: Had failed to get into Oxford; went to the University of Aberdeen but dropped out after one term

Time: the same faces, seven years apart

Returning to the same faces every seven years makes ageing and death visible. Lynn was the first participant to die, and 63 Up could only tell her through her family; Nick recorded his 70 Up interview three days before his death; John lost his father at nine and said so on screen only in 56 Up.

  • Lynn Johnson · Age 63: Posthumous. 63 Up recaps Lynn's life to 56, then reveals that she died in May 2013 after a short illness — the first participant to die.
  • Nick Hitchon · Age 70: Appears posthumously: the interview was recorded in 2023, three days before his death on 23 July 2023 (ITV described it as 'poignant and moving')
  • John Brisby · Age 14: His father had died when John was 9 — not disclosed on screen until 56 Up; his mother worked to keep him in private education
  • Tony Walker · Age 70: Said giving up riding was the greatest regret of his life; recalled a mentor warning he would struggle to keep a jockey's weight

Marriage and family: the pivot is rarely a job

For most of them the pivot of each film is a relationship, not a job: Suzy's transformation between 21 and 28, Bruce's late wedding shortly before 42 Up, Sue's twenty-year engagement and her marriage at 64.

Mental health and luck: what class cannot predict

Neil's homelessness and depression, Peter's withdrawal after the tabloid attacks, Nick's cancer — none of it predicted by where they started; by 70 Up both Neil and Peter were speaking on camera for people living with mental illness.

  • Neil Hughes · Age 28: Homeless and drifting in the Scottish Highlands, living on benefits; slept rough in huts and once in a bulldozer
  • Peter Davies · Age 28: Right-wing tabloids branded him an 'angry young red'; he received hate mail and, by some accounts, it cost him his teaching job
  • Nick Hitchon · Age 63: Diagnosed with a cancerous mass in his throat shortly before filming (some reports say ten days before)
  • Neil Hughes · Age 70: Made a plea on mental illness: people like him have not 'chosen to be weird or antisocial'
  • Peter Davies · Age 70: Spoke, from inside Durham Cathedral, about the depression he had lived with on and off throughout his life

Education and opportunity: doors that opened or closed

Grammar school, Oxbridge, a 1960s children's home, emigration — doors that opened or closed. Of the three East End girls only Lynn passed into grammar school; Nick went from a Skipton grammar school to Oxford; Paul and Simon started in the same children's-home dormitory, one to Australia, one staying in London.

  • Lynn Johnson · Age 14: The only one of the three to pass into a grammar school; filmed in a cookery class.
  • Nick Hitchon · Age 14: A boarder at Ermysted's Grammar School in Skipton (attended 1968–1975)
  • Symon Basterfield · Age 7: Resident of Shaftesbury Homes children's home in Twickenham, filmed with Paul in the dormitory
  • Paul Kligerman · Age 14: About a year after Seven Up! his father and stepmother emigrated with him and his brother to Australia, settling in the Melbourne area
  • Symon Basterfield · Age 42: The freezer factory had closed; working as a forklift operator, moving into freight work at Heathrow

The ethics of the gaze: they talk back

The participants increasingly talk back: Jackie asks in 49 Up why marriage and sex were only put to the women; Tony confronts Apted in 63 Up over the prison he was expected to end up in at 21; John and Charles wait until 70 Up to say their refusals aloud — Charles: Apted 'gave everyone a part to play'.

  • Jackie Bassett · Age 49: Openly confronts Apted on camera about the marriage/sex questions he asked the women but not the men, and about the narrative his editing has locked her into; Apted keeps the confrontation in the film.
  • Tony Walker · Age 63: Confronted Apted on camera about having judged him at 21 and suspected he would end up in prison; Apted conceded he had been wrong
  • Charles Furneaux · Age 70: Explained his objection: Apted 'had cast everyone and they had their role to fulfil'; his concern was 'what TV does to people'
  • John Brisby · Age 70: Confirmed on camera that none of his interviews from 35 Up onward were conducted by Apted — a condition of his return

Britain itself: a social history

The series is often read as a social history of Britain, and its big events land on particular people: Peter's attack on the Thatcher government at 28; the council cuts that reached Lynn's library post; the 2008 crash that ended Tony's Spanish plans and the Uber years that hit his cab trade; Jackie reassessed as 'fit for work' in the austerity years.

  • Peter Davies · Age 28: Called Thatcher's government 'the most incompetent, uncaring bloody shower we've ever had'
  • Lynn Johnson · Age 49: Devastated by news that her post as children's librarian may be abolished by council cuts; fears for supporting her family.
  • Tony Walker · Age 56: The 2008 financial crash wiped out his Spanish property/bar development plans
  • Tony Walker · Age 63: Uber and ride-hailing had badly damaged the black-cab trade he had relied on for four decades
  • Jackie Bassett · Age 56: Has been on disability benefit for 14 years because of rheumatoid arthritis; under the coalition government's reassessment she is declared "fit to work" despite being unable to use her hands or stand for long.

Looking back

What people say

It began as a political film. In 1964 Granada's World in Action set out to prove that the British class system had already written a child's life by the age of seven; the Jesuit maxim in the opening narration, "Give me a child until he is seven and I will give you the man", is the thesis.

Roger Ebert put 28 Up on the ten-best list he submitted to Sight & Sound in 1991 and reviewed every film after it; much of the series' reputation in America comes from him.

Apted later conceded two things on camera: that the early films asked the three East End girls only about marriage and children (he admitted it to Jackie in 63 Up), and that he had expected Tony to end up in prison (he admitted that to Tony in the same film).

It is not a study. The fourteen were chosen for television, ten boys and four girls, with no control group and no sampling; its value is time. Nothing else has filmed the same people for sixty-two years, and the further it goes, the more time rather than class becomes its subject.

What this life shows

"Give me a child until he is seven" is half right.

The right half is temperament: Jackie, who never stopped talking at seven, is still answering back at seventy; Andrew, reserved at seven, stayed reserved; Bruce, who wanted to be a missionary, really did go and teach in Bangladesh. The wrong half is fate: Neil fell from the brightest child to a hillside in the Highlands and climbed back; Suzy rejected everything at twenty-one and was a settled mother at twenty-eight; Peter changed careers three times. Character persists. The track can change.

What changes the track is never one person's will. It is another person.

Neil had Bruce, Paul had Susan, Symon had Vienetta, Suzy had Rupert, Tony had Debbie. In almost every upward turn across the fourteen lives there is a specific person standing next to it, and not someone who handed over resources but someone who stayed: a bed, a marriage that held, twenty years of not walking away.

They caught a window.

A farm boy went to Oxford; two boys from a children's home ended up with families and grandchildren; an East End girl with no degree ran the administration of a law school. The lift came from free grammar schools, student grants and the post-war welfare state. This generation had the best social mobility Britain has had; it tightened afterwards. Their rise is not the norm. It is timing.

The camera changed the people it filmed.

Bruce met Neil because of the films; Granada paid for the trip that reconnected Paul with his estranged mother; Peter came back to sell records; Nick's first marriage left the series because of how viewers reacted; Charles went into documentaries to get away from it. A real longitudinal study takes care not to feed results back to its subjects. This one did the opposite, which is why it is a document, not a data set.

Seven threads · Eight questions · About the series