Watching Seven Up

Posted on: 8 May 2012

Andrew, John and Charles attended the same preparatory school in Kensington; their counterparts are the London East End state primary girls Jackie, Sue and Lynn. Simon and Paul lived in the same children’s home. The two middle-class representatives, Neil and Peter, were classmates from the same comfortable Liverpool suburb. The others were interviewed singly, but selected with a view of creating pairings and opposites through which the underlying arguments could be explored and illustrated: Tony (a short, wannabe jockey) was chosen to show a poor East End working-class boy; Nick from a remote farm in the Yorkshire Dales represents the working-class rural community, in contrast to Suzy, from a wealthy rural Scottish background. And Bruce, the sensitive son of a missionary attending an upper-middleclass boarding school, was contrasted with the two Bernardo’s home boys.

SEVEN UP! was originally only ever going to be stand-alone film. Michael Apted remembers that it was not until 1970, when he sat in the Granada canteen and Denis Forman, the company’s visionary executive director, came up to him and said ‘why don’t we go back and see what had happened to them?’ that the 7 PLUS SEVEN programme was initiated. With each successive instalment (from 28 UP in 1984 to 49 UP in 2005), the series has kept adding to an important anthropological and sociological project, perhaps the only filmic longitudinal study of human development across classes still going. The only really comparable achievement is the German series The Children of Golzow by Winfried Junge, who from 1961 to 2007 observed by camera eighteen people, born from 1953 to 1955, in an Eastern German town in Brandenburg, and which has now ended. The Seven Up series’ popularity with the public has lead to several spin-off series and the format was franchised to Russia, America, South-Africa; the BBC recently started a new Seven Up 2000 and a similar programme Child of our Time, presented by Robert Winston.

As the history of the lives of the children evolve in front of the audience, the changes in technical facilities and editing styles over time can be followed, too. The first black and white film shows a strong influence of the aesthetic and visual style of British Free Cinema productions of the late 1950s. The series’ strength comes largely from the ‘talking heads’ and the power of the interviews, but the determined viewpoints of the programme and the reading of the material are strongly guided by the voice-over, for example juxtaposing Suzy’s ballet lesson and Tony in the playground or Neil’s ‘free-movement PE class’, with the narration is stating: ‘This distinction between freedom and discipline is the key to their whole future’. An important formula is the repetition of iconic shots and citations, which get familiar and even over-used in the course of the series – the trio of Jackie, Lynn, and Sue is always being seated left to right; some of the original sepia snippets being repeated over all programmes, for example Nick being asked about a girlfriend saying: ‘I don’t answer this kind of questions’, or Neil ‘When I grow up I want to be an astronaut…’ and Lynn: ‘I want to work in Woolworths’.