The Seven Up series of TV documentaries by Michael Apted has followed the lives of fourteen British children since 1964 at seven yearly intervals, with the next edition planned for screening on ITV later in 2012. On 8 May 2012 there will be a special screening at BAFTA in London of 56 Up, the new film in the series, followed by a Q&A with director Michel Apted. For further information, and details on booking, visit the BAFTA website at: www.bafta.org/ Below, Susanne Hammacher of the Royal Anthropological Institute looks at the history and impact of the films.
About the Author: Susanne Hammacher is the Film Officer of the Royal Anthropological Institute. and coordinator of the RAI International Festival of Ethnographic Film since 2002. She read anthropology, economics and history of art at the University of Basel, Switzerland. She worked for over ten years as head of education and public programmes at the Museum der Kulturen in Basel, and as exhibition officer at the Museum of Childhood, V&A, London. She has been conducting fieldwork in Mexico since 1982 on aspects of trading and market systems, gender and migration, textiles (silk production, platting, weaving), community museums and audio-visual indigenous media. She is curating and facilitating various screening and outreach projects in London as well as working on the digitisation of the RAI collection.
The children were selected to represent the range of socio-economic backgrounds in Britain at that time, with the explicit assumption that each child's social class predetermines their future.
In 1964 Granada decided to air a forty-minute documentary called SEVEN UP! for their new current affairs strand World in Action. Its first series editor, the Australian Tim Hewart, abandoned the studio and interview format of such rivals as Panorama and This Week and aimed to exploit the journalistic potential of the new lightweight 16mm cameras and synchronised sound equipment. As Claire Lewis, a researcher and producer on later editions of the programme, remembers: ‘Hewart was horrified by the rigidity of social class in Britain in the 60s and wanted to make a film about how constricting it was and whether or not someone could escape it’. The resulting programme was directed by Canadian Paul Almond, the two researchers were Michael Apted (a Granada graduate trainee, who became the director of the follow-up editions) and Gordon MacDougall. It aimed to show what the future of Britain would hold, under the motto: ‘The shop steward and the executive of 2000 are now seven years old.’ The premise of the film was taken from the Jesuit motto ‘Give me a child until he is seven and I will give you the man’.
Jackie, Lynn and Sue in 'Seven Up!' (1964 © Granada, courtesy of Network DVD)
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.
Jackie, Lynn and Sue in '7 Plus 7 (1971 © Granada, courtesy of Network DVD)
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’.
Jackie, Lynn and Sue in '28 Up' (1984 © Granada, courtesy of Network DVD)
A fascination of the series is to observe through the stories of the protagonists the impact of the British school system or how the character of whole cities, the political landscape and aspects of British life, have changed over the forty-two years. In ‘49 UP’ for example Tony, now having a second home in Spain, talks about how the East End had changed and how in way Petticoat Lane has been re-created by British expats in Spain. Through its ‘characters’, the series is telling a part of British social history. Although the programme began as a political documentary, the series has become a film of human nature, capturing the drama of ordinary life.
Even if the films charts the growth of individuals, the reason for the first film holds true: while the rich kids are living the lives plotted for them, the majority the working class children have stayed rooted to their past. The exceptions are Tony, who now can be considered middle class, or Nick who migrated to America to become an university professor. Over the course of the project the programme had a direct effect on the lives of the participants, with three of them opting out from being interviewed any more. John refers to the programme as a poison pill that he is subjected to every seven years, and only agrees to get back in the hope that his contribution will draw support for his charity work in Bulgaria. 49 UP starts with Jackie confronting Apted on his style of questions, his assumptions about her life and his choice of editing. In fact the only life that isn't laid bare in front of the viewer is that of the 15th character, the director Michael Apted, who became an established Hollywood feature director over the years; even though he is present as interviewer, we only hear his voice and he remains permanently off-screen.
The series is available now as a six DVD set from retail outlets, with an extended director’s talk with Apted on the SEVEN UP! and very insightful audio commentaries by producer Claire Lewis, film editor Kim Horton and cameraman George Jesse Turner on the 28 UP disc. A companion book published in 2007 in the BFI TV classics series, by Stella Bruzzi, Professor of Film and Television Studies at University of Warwick, is a very welcome and helpful sourcebook, telling the production history and situating the series within British Documentary History and it’s relation and influence on British Reality TV. Bruzzi interviewed not only several of the producer but as well two of the ‘children’ for this first comprehensive account of the iconic series.
The series is very valuable for teaching, in higher and secondary education, and particular subjects as media and television studies, British history, childhood studies, sociology and visual anthropology.
Susanne Hammacher www.therai.org.uk/
On 8 May 2012 there will be a special screening at BAFTA in London of 56 Up, the new film in the series, followed by a Q&A with director Michel Apted. For further information, and details on booking, visit the BAFTA website at: www.bafta.org/