70-Up
As a British person of a certain age, the Up Series has been televisual background radiation throughout my entire life. The people featured in 7-Up are roughly the same age as my mother and father; the last episode of 70-Up was broadcast this week on my father’s 72nd birthday. It was a big event in our house when it rolled around every seven years. You see, while Dad spent a lot of that time being a TV repairman, he never (and still doesn’t) said “I want to watch this.” But every seven years, it was understood that Dad really wanted to watch this show, and wanted us all to watch it together, which to me gave the programme a special sheen distinct from almost everything else on television.
In addition to all that, one particular edition is seared in my memory. Before the broadcast of 49-Up in 2005, I had a blazing row with my parents, the like of which we have never had before or since. I was in a bad place, and they were very worried about me, and I reacted poorly to this. I felt that I was never going to amount to anything and that I had completely failed. It may sound trite, I know, but watching the show after the argument helped so much; I could see that, for example, Bruce was absolutely terrible with relationships right up until he wasn’t, that Neil had managed to claw himself back to a life that that was much better than being homeless up in the Shetland Isles, that Suzy went off the rails, but found a way forward, and so on. It really did help me that evening, and then, thanks to my grandmother pointing out a job advert in Oxford and a knowledge of Linux, two months later I was back in full-time employment, and things got better, even if some aspects took longer than others.
It was important, later on, when I became Nick and travelled across the Atlantic, that I took Tammy to go see 56-Up when it did a tour of US cinemas. These are the people of my parents’ generation; this is what I grew up with (and just how playgrounds in the 1960s were terrifying deathtraps). The series means an awful lot to me, and one day I will sit down with Maeryn and show her the country that her Granny and Grandad grew up in, a country that doesn’t exist in quite the same way as it did in 1964, and we will go through the series until she gets bored and goes off and watches some crazed AI thing that I can’t yet even imagine.
As I’ve mentioned, I re-watched all of Up over the past couple of weeks in preparation for the final episode. I’m not sure if I can really recommend that; everybody’s lives pass so quickly, the clips changing but also repeating in different but familiar ways each time around, rapidly building up sediment and silt of footage and decisions. The jackets worn in 1978, the wallpaper in 1985, the Olympics in 2012. I really also cannot recommend watching it all on two plane trips, either, as when Nick revealed his condition in 63-Up…well, it probably wasn’t entirely great for everybody else in the row, who were doubtless left wondering why this middle-aged fool was tearing up over his iPad. After this, I knew that 70-Up was going to be a messy evening, and something I should probably do by myself (and some whisky). I was not wrong.
I was actually doing somewhat okay in the first part, right up until it got to Bruce walking across the beach and the reveal that he does volunteering for the RNLI. And of course he does. At 70 years old, strapping on a lifejacket — a good Christian man in a world where that phrase seems almost completely out-of-date. Just a wonderful person. I think Apted was a little disappointed in him going off to work in a private school and (in Apted’s mind) retreating to family life, but I loved this bit, echoing back to another part where I lost it on the plane back to the US, where in 42-Up (1998) Bruce talks about an Algerian friend of his that says Britain is so welcoming, more welcoming than anywhere else he’d been, and I teared up a little for what we have lost over the past thirty years.
(again, apologies to everybody that sat in that row)
The structure this time around was deliberately different. The first episode was mostly that sediment, with maybe a minute or two at most of new footage (although we did find out that Symon and his wife had fostered over 130 children, which was astonishing). The second episode was really where it all was; you could say that they were finally getting their own back on Apted now that he wasn’t there, but the series has always had autocritique built into it right back from 7+7 onwards. John revealed that he wouldn’t let Apted do any of his interviews when he came back due to how badly he thought he was portrayed at 7, 14, and 21. And while I don’t think he’s entirely wrong — Apted did have preconceived notions about the children in the show, but I also think that over the course of the series, John actually comes out of it really well. Yes, certainly, he’s 100% the punchable Tory toff at 14 and 21, and you can complain about Apted edits, but you said the priggish things, whereas Andrew and Charles just looked a little embarrassed. But Apted does give him the grace and space at 21 for John to say that he believes that his class position gives him responsibility, and then the wide arc of the series shows John doing exactly that. I’m sure that politically, I am poles apart from him, but damn, you have to respect him for using his privilege to raise so much money for Bulgaria and all the charity work he did there and his QC work in the courts over the decades. It was also interesting for Andrew to reveal that his parents came over as asylum seekers just before WW2; both he and John being such bastions of British upper-classes in 7-Up and you’d never know from just that initial episode how quickly their family tree comes from outside the British Isles, again reinforcing just how the British are a mongrel people, and how the country is all the better for it.
And then there’s Nick. On my first go-around, I identified with Bruce…how could I not? But on the rewatch, I saw a lot of myself in Nick. And how could I not? The boy who ran away to America, leaving his extended family behind and all that comes with that. I think myself incredibly lucky that I live in a time period where I can, every Friday, call home on the iPad and the family gets to have a chat with Maeryn and me. We’re going home in two weeks and again at Christmas, and hopefully my family will be over to visit again next year. We can text, send photos and videos, staying in touch with an ease that Nick never had. And yet it’s still hard, so I just can’t imagine can’t imagine how difficult it was for him. And then at the end, Nick holding on just to complete the interview, about how important the series was to him…and dying just a few days after filming had finished…it was a lot.
Apted does come in for his reckoning, not just through the group, but also from himself, with audio interviews threaded through the second episode describing how he got things wrong, particularly his vision of Tony turning to crime in 21-Up. I think there’s a subtle shift from 28-Up onwards where it’s a little less didactic (perhaps because of that, and Jackie’s understandable reaction to his questioning about marrying so early). But maybe John and Charles aside, it’s clear that Apted loved the group, and they loved him back, even if it was at the remove of “a difficult uncle”. We also saw a lot of clips that I don’t think we’ve seen before; takes that were never used, other conversations that took place at the 21-Up party that weren’t part of the original broadcast, including a fairly standard “foreign people are coming here and taking our council houses” diatribe from Tony that does put Apted’s accusations of racism in a context that Apted himself could have made stronger in the edit, but didn’t (of course, Tony probably gets the harshest put-down in the entire series when Apted points out that Tony failed at all his listed achievements). You do wonder just what else is in those archives, and also can I please have access to it so I could tag it and index it into a search engine? Pretty please?
(Tony gets a great little moment where he reveals that he’s picked up most of the group in his cab one time or another. And of course John tipped beyond all sense of reasonableness)
It had to end, and I feel it ends on a triumphant note. A monumental achievement of television and of life itself. Sue even finally got remarried! Did it really prove the maxim of “Give me a child until he is seven and I will show you the man”? Maybe in some ways, but not really. There’s something of the child throughout their years, but things change, experience takes over. Did it prove Apted’s indictment of the class system? Again, not so much, though it is true that despite all three of them having to work hard for what they achieved, it’s clear that John, Andrew, and Charles (and Suzy to a lesser extent) all stayed within the protections of their class and basically followed out the path mapped out for them. But everybody else did things that Apted never really expected. And I think that’s what the series changed into; the time-lapse of all these lives, all unique, and all mundane. They could be any one of us, or our fathers and our mothers, living through the 20th century. We may never see a documentary of its length and breadth ever again, and I’m grateful all of us still here got to see it to the end.