When a Yorkshire-born scientist I’d never met died last year, I grieved as though I knew him, which I did in a way. Nick Hitchon had been part of my life since he appeared on television aged six, saying he wanted to learn about the moon.
Nick made his TV debut in 1964 but I didn’t see it until the early 1980s, when my east London comprehensive school showed us the first two episodes of Seven Up!, a television series that has charted 14 British lives every seven years since. It emerged as the clear winner of a Broadcasting Press Guild (BPG) poll of the most influential British TV programmes over the past 50 years. Nick last appeared on 63 Up in 2019, talking as perceptively as ever about his throat cancer and his life.
Those early episodes made a huge impact on me, not because of the original premise – “Give me a boy at the age of seven and I will show you the man” – but because of what it said about class and Britain, and eventually what it said about life and humanity. At a time when British television is dominated by international conglomerates and online services, how much more important can that be?
My old English teacher Richard Andrews, who has gone on to great success in education, said the programmes met curriculum demands to engender a sense of social justice and equal opportunity. My shock at another of the participants, Andrew, a seven-year-old who read the FT, did just that.
Nick, a clever lad from a farm, was not the first of the 14 original participants to die. Lynn Johnson had been one of three girls from working-class east London (just like us!) who had appeared throughout the series. From the very beginning, when the friends talked of their ambitions – just after I’d had to fight to switch office studies for geography – I cheered them on through heartache and triumph. Lynn married and had children young, as did so many girls of her age and class, but became a librarian and eventually a 25-year governor of a school only a mile from my childhood home.
Paul Almond directed Seven Up!, before Michael Apted took over for the rest of the series. Apted subsequently said he had been asked to find children at the “extreme” so he trawled orphanages and the East End, as well as private schools, farms and what I can imagine he called “the north”. He admitted much later that he thought the requisite cheeky cockney, Tony, would end up in prison and so was delighted when he became a cabbie after his early ambitions as a jockey failed.
Leaving aside the terrible lack of diversity and fact there were only four girls out of the original 14 children – a window into documentary-making of the time, if nothing else – this most British social experiment features three working-class girls set to leave school as teenagers against a trio of posh boys who knew at seven that they were aiming for Oxbridge; two of them became lawyers, and the other a documentary-maker. (The latter, Charles Furneaux, was ironically the only one of the 14 who refused to appear in more than three shows, which says something about journalists perhaps but, a bit like the show, possibly says more about him.)
The BPG list, chosen by its 100-plus members (all TV and media journalists), spans the last half century and includes a great roster of TV talent, including I May Destroy You, Big Brother and Life On Earth. The shows are all great shop windows for the value of television but none more so than Up, particularly for those of us who have hit half centuries ourselves. Michele Grant, a former news executive, said that, as the participants were three years older than her, “they have always been there to help me think about what comes next in life”.
It was always a social experiment. Apted, who died aged 79 in January 2021, said the original team had wanted “a glimpse of England in the year 2000. The union leader and the business executive.” Women comprised very few of either in the 1960s, of course, and Apted has said he regrets how few he included. He largely missed the feminist revolution.
Yet, the class certainties of those early episodes – John later objected to being portrayed as so privileged, as he was only nine when his father died – increasingly gave way to our sense of understanding for the participants as human beings. The astonishing length of the show – there have been nine instalments since 1964 – meant that the duty of care was not just the responsibility of the programme-makers, but of all of us. As great programme-making should be.
There has been no confirmation that 70 Up will come out in 2026, now that Apted is dead. It would be the 10th film in the series and an ideal place to stop in many ways. Its absence would be a huge shame, like a great book missing its last few pages. The Up series taught us about Britain: not just about home, but about so many other parts of the country. It is, like all of us, flawed in some way, but it speaks of people and a place still worth caring about.
Jane Martinson is a member of BPG, whose 50th annual awards event takes place on Thursday 21 March
