70 Up review – a deeply moving conclusion for the 63-year-long TV experiment

The landmark documentary series looked like it was done for good – until one participant was diagnosed with terminal cancer. Asif Kapadia takes the helm for its most elegaic, thoughtful outing ever

And so the great experiment begun by Granada Television in 1964 is over. That year, Seven Up! introduced the viewing public to 14 primary school children – 10 boys and four girls from a range of backgrounds – who would become part of an ongoing documentary project that returned to film them at regular intervals and interrogate the truth of the Jesuitical motto “Give me the child for the first seven years and I will give you the man”.

Seven Up!, part of ITV’s flagship World in Action series, was directed by Paul Almond but thereafter the enterprise became synonymous with Michael Apted, who originally helped find the children and took over the making of the programmes. He died in 2021, two years after completing 63 Up. It had been thought the series would end there but when one of the participants, Nick Hitchon – a Yorkshire farmer’s son who grew up to be a nuclear scientist – called one of the team to say that he had been diagnosed with terminal cancer and wanted to give one last interview, a final episode was commissioned.

Directed by Asif Kapadia, it has a more reflective and elegiac tone than in previous years. Lynn, who spent most of her life as a devoted children’s librarian – council funds and cuts permitting – died in 2013. Almost everyone else is retired. Everyone is looking back. Jackie speaks with great relief of the calm and relative solitude in which she now lives, having moved away from the family that – reading between the lines – she clearly loves but required much from her. The three prep school boys, John, Charles and Andrew, first seen perched on the sofa in their headteacher’s study and talking with disarming sweetness about futures at Charterhouse, the Dragon and Oxbridge, have had the lives of privilege and ease that they expected and that we expected for them. Andrew wishes he had spent more time with his family. “School plays,” he says. “Sports days.” There are shades of similar regret from some of the other men, too. But the Up series has always had to sacrifice the interrogation of such detail for breadth of coverage, and this is one of the many potentially fruitful paths you wish had been travelled further down.

Tony, the self-described “Little Artful Dodger” and would-be jockey turned cab driver remains as irrepressible as ever, though he notes his biggest mistake was deciding not to commit to the former career after his mentor warned him that he would struggle to meet the necessary weight all his life. Bruce has retired from teaching and now sings in the local choir, walks his dog on the beach and volunteers with the local branch of the RNLI. The thoughtful, gentle, Christian boy has become a thoughtful, gentle, Christian man.

Symon, the terribly sad-eyed boy brought up in a children’s home (“What you don’t have, you don’t miss,” he said at 14, and it was so nakedly untrue that you still have to look away when they show this moving scene again here) has fostered more than 100 children with his second wife over the last 20 years. He looks happier now. The children are welcomed back for visits all the time. Paul, Symon’s companion in the children’s home, has built himself a good life in Australia. He is a grandfather now. “Family is 100% the main thing.”

Neil – the perky, bright Liverpudlian schoolboy who dreamed of Oxford but has struggled with depression all his life, and experienced periods of homelessness in between being a local councillor and lay minister and, briefly, a husband – now lives alone in France. The perkiness left long ago but he is as thoughtful, articulate and unassuming as ever. He is clearly still vulnerable in many ways and his existence precarious, but he has found a way of being that brings him contentment enough. Yes, he says, he is sometimes lonely. “But that is a characteristic of the age … I’m probably as happy as I can be, given my life.”

There is, especially in the second instalment of this final film, something of a meta-narrative too, as the participants give their thoughts about the series and about Apted. We also hear archive footage of Apted reflecting on what he learned over the years. Jackie was perhaps his earliest and most vocal combatant, challenging him over various questions – largely about marriage and sex – that she said he only dared ask the women, and she pulls him up on his class bias too. John describes him as having “a sneering and somewhat supercilious manner” and, in essence, painting the privileged as bogeymen. Apted himself said he was judgmental at the beginning, and gradually taught himself to stay out of things as much as possible. But it remains clear, 60-odd years on, that this was not a rigorous or objective journalistic venture but a series profoundly shaped by one man’s vision, background and baked-in assumptions. Acknowledging this, as Kapadia does, is the best thing to do with it now. The achievement has become an artefact to be admired, still, but questioned too.

• 70 Up aired on ITV1 and is on ITVX now in the UK and on SBS and SBS on Demand in Australia on 7 October.