TV’s most fascinating experiment ends with an emotional gut-punch

70 Up ★★★★

70 Up brings to a close one of the most fascinating – and arguably the longest-running – shows in the annals of TV history. It started in 1964 with a group of 14 children from a cross-section of English society in the documentary Seven Up! It was there we met Cockney lad Tony, who at age seven planned to be a jockey; headstrong Jackie, who said she would marry a boy with money; and Symon, the only non-white participant, who was raised in a boy’s home and in reply to a question about his future education replied, “What’s a university?”

Every seven years since, director and behind-the-camera interviewer Michael Apted returned to see how these playful children became feisty teenagers, then parents and eventually grandparents; how marriages were made and unmade; how hopes soared and were sometimes extinguished.

The original concept was to test the Jesuit adage, “Give me a child until he is seven and I will give you the man” – a window into how class and socioeconomic circumstances determine the chances and opportunities that shape their (and our own) lives. But what it’s mostly remembered for today is the front-row seat it offered to the daily dramas of life and how each of the participants was forged into the person that they became.

Now, here they are as 70-year-olds looking back, but also forwards, in what is touted to be the last instalment of the show.

In the two-part 70 Up, we see where the 13 surviving people have ended up (Lynn, the librarian, died in 2013). For the most part, they’re fulfilled, contented and self-aware – which may be surprising given the challenges some have faced. They are also deeply contemplative and ruminative, not only about how their lives have unfolded but how they’ve been depicted in the films.

Directed by Asif Kapadia (Amy, Senna, Diego Maradona), 70 Up is very much about legacy (Apted died in 2021). At stake is not only the personal legacies of the participants, but the legacy of the series itself. Several talk about how the show has turned them into celebrities, and we are poignantly reminded that as seven-year-olds they never really consented to be part of a program that has come to define them.

They all return, however, for this last hurrah – even some who opted not to participate in earlier instalments. Their humility and, ultimately, gratitude are truly heartrending.

Indeed, 70 Up raises many valid questions about Apted’s agendas and preconceived ideas, such as the sexist questions he put to the female participants, as well as setting up the posh schoolboys to look like undeserving twits. “Sneering and supercilious” is how one of the participants remembers him. Hearing some of Apted’s loaded and insulting questions from earlier chapters is cringe-making.

That’s one part of the legacy that 70 Up wants to correct. The other is that the series’ focus on outdated notions of class and society meant it wasn’t always asking the right questions. It’s here that 70 Up, its second episode in particular, delivers an emotional punch to the gut. There’s Neil, the sunny daydreamer in Seven Up! who now talks with admirable candour about his lifelong mental health battles. And Symon, who still rues having never met his father, and has gone on to foster more than 100 children.

What we take away isn’t the fairness of the cards they were dealt but how they faced the unpredictable twists and turns that life put in their paths. It’s impossible not to be moved by this remarkable endeavour.

70 Up premieres 8.30pm Wednesday, October 7 on SBS and SBS On Demand.

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