ROBERT HARDMAN: The last ever series of 7 Up has become a lament for a lost Britain – and a generation who only asked for a hand up, not a handout

They never sought to be stars. Indeed, many would regret ever agreeing to have their entire lives chronicled by what has often been described as the ‘greatest documentary’ ever made, one which has more than stood the test of time.

Back in 1964, television cameras revealed the lives and inner thoughts of a cross section of 14 British seven-year-olds for a series called 7 Up.

The cameras would come back every seven years, creating a genuine piece of broadcasting and social history, one which will come to an end this month.

We will finally bid farewell as those cheeky children in grainy black and white now sign off in colour as pensioners in the final series 70 Up.

Along the way, they have also charted the trajectory of post-war Britain. For it is not the original cast who have changed so much as the world around them. 

The result is a powerful elegy to a generation who, at times, seem entirely removed from the entitled, ill-tempered, serially complaining 21st century society we have become.

Regular viewers will see what finally happened to Andrew, the bumptious seven-year-old FT reader forecasting his own career path of public school/Oxbridge/City law firm (spoiler alert: It happened) or Jackie, Sue and Lynn, the three little girls from London’s East End with dreams of houses and children or Symon, the quiet mixed-race care home boy who just wanted ‘to be liked’.

As with all previous iterations of the series, this one will bounce around across the years. We will see Suzy, the wide-eyed seven-year-old ballet dancer, who morphs from 14-year-old introvert to 21-year-old chain-smoking rebel to 28-year-old Sloane Ranger mum with matching Diana haircut. Or Peter, the whipsmart farmer’s boy from Yorkshire who, via Oxford, becomes a nuclear physicist.

He is one of two of the original 14 who are no longer with us (nor is the former director, Michael Apted). We will be reminded that others found the series so intrusive, voyeuristic and unsettling that they bowed out along the way.   

The cast pictured together in 1977 for series 3 of the show titled 21 Up

It will be gripping and often emotional television featuring real-life stories which have amassed a global following.

I have revisited all nine of the previous series – which run to 17 hours of television – and have seen clips of the two-part farewell which, for now, remains under wraps. 

Stand back and, at another level, however, I find that there is something both uplifting and depressing about the Up project.

For, ultimately, this is a valediction to a generation which has always been told that it is the luckiest in history. 

These are the new Elizabethans, the children of the post-war ‘baby boom’, the beneficiaries of wartime sacrifice and a rocketing life expectancy who are now the triple-locked pensioners increasingly blamed for blocking the job and housing prospects of today’s youth. In short, this is a lament for Boomer Britain.

For despite all the changes in appearances, fashions and accents – the posh boys become less plum-voiced with age while the working-class children become correspondingly more articulate – the most striking aspect is what does not change. 

From rich to poor, all the 7-Uppers share a common characteristic: They all want to get on, to work hard, to be in control of their own lives. 

Despite the hardships – and some have endured serious adversity – they do not expect an easy ride at the expense of others.

In this regard, the series stands as a fascinating companion piece to another landmark documentary series. 

For exactly 50 years after 7 Up hit our screens, Channel 4 produced a hugely popular fly-on-the-wall series on life in the Winson Green area of Birmingham. Called Benefits Street, it showed the lives and aspirations of a community in which life on welfare was seen by many as a normal lifestyle.

Though attacked by some Left-wing commentators as ‘poverty porn’, it was generally regarded as a sobering portrait of a non-working underclass now pushing up our annual welfare bill to £350billion a year, more than half of it spent on working age claimants.

In the last year alone, according to the Conservatives, the number of working-age households receiving more in benefits than someone on a national average £32,000 income has risen by 30 per cent to more than 600,000.

Last month, the Office of National Statistics showed that the number of young people not in employment, education or training, so-called Neets, is now just shy of one million.

Absorb these figures then watch 70 Up, over two episodes on ITV from September 15. I can safely say that not one of the 14 original cast members would ever have contemplated, let alone tolerated, being a Neet. None, even at their lowest ebb, would have made it into the cast of Benefits Street. They would have been too proud.

The films began back in 1964 with ‘7 Up’ – following fourteen children who were all seven years old at the time

Pictured: Jackie Bassett, Lynn Johnson and Sue Lusk in the very first show in 1964

Yes, they all grew up with the safety net of the post-war welfare state beneath them. Yes, as pensioners, all are now in receipt of benefits of some kind.

But just look at their world view aged 21, 28, 35, 42 and so on. Broadly, they all set out with the aim of having and providing for families. Nearly all of them do, whether in happy marriages, as single parents or as divorcees. None of them blithely expects the state to pick up the pieces.

One of the most poignant stories of the whole series is that of Neil Hughes, the thoughtful chess- playing boy from a middle-class home in Liverpool. From childish dreams of space travel, he suffered terrible bullying at school, dropped out of Aberdeen University and ended up homeless.

He rebuilt his life through odd- jobs and ended up both a lay clergyman and Lib Dem councillor. The best thing about it, he said in 63 Up, is that his councillor’s allowance and his abstemious standard of life meant he could come off benefits. 

‘What a great relief it was to do that,’ he reflects, a sentiment which would be met with open-mouthed incredulity by the cast of Benefits Street.

Or take Jackie Bassett, one of the three East End best friends who was first married at 19, twice divorced and raised her three children as a single parent.

She was later diagnosed with rheumatoid arthritis which stopped her working. Yet she would be deeply hurt when the programme’s director and his team focused on her illness and told them so in the next series.

‘The last one was very much based on the sympathy and the illness that I’ve got and what I may or may not be able to do,’ she said. ‘It should have been about what I can do, what I am doing, what I will do.’

Nor was there any grumbling about her lot. ‘We cut our costs accordingly,’ she added sternly.

She later said her dream would be to go back to school and start her education all over again so she could have proper discussions with people like Michael Apted. 

‘I’m more intelligent than you thought I would be,’ she chides him in 49 Up, during one of the stand-out moments of the entire 63-year production.

It is only then that she vents the pain and fury she felt in the earlier episodes when Oxbridge-educated Apted and his metropolitan production team would persistently ask three working class girls from the East End about their lives and futures through the prism of boyfriends and babies. The posher members of the cast were asked about university and professional aspirations.

But then, as Apted later admitted, the production was never really a fly-on-the-wall exercise. It started out with a hard-boiled political agenda. 

Amid the swirling cultural changes of the early 1960s, independent television was doing its best to shake the (then) cosy Establishment consensus at the BBC. ITV had a punchy documentary unit called World In Action and, within it, an Australian-born producer, Tim Hewat, who scoffed at claims that post-war Britain was becoming a more egalitarian, classless society.

He wanted to show that the class system was as rigid as ever. He was struck by the old Jesuit saying: ‘Give me a child until he is seven, and I will give you the man.’ And, thus, 7 Up was born. Apted came on board as part of the team and later ran the show.

Michael Apted, who passed away in 2021, directed the ‘Up’ films from 1970 up until 63 Up in 2019

It could not possibly happen today, or certainly not along the lines of the Up project. Quite apart from the likely public reaction to the borderline creepy grilling of 14-year-olds about boyfriends and girlfriends, the gravest sin would be the heretical lack of diversity. No TV network would touch it, let alone broadcast it.

Here is a film purporting to show a proper cross section of British life. Yet there are ten male and just four female characters.

It is almost entirely devoid of multi-culturalism. No one is foreign-born and everyone grew up speaking English.

No one blames ‘mental health’ for everything, no one wears a hijab or anything other than conventional Western clothes, no one has (or admits to) an addiction and no one is gay, let alone trans.

All end up in a heterosexual marital relationship. There is just one non-white face among the 14, Symon. There is also one migrant, Paul, another care home child, but he is a Brit who ends up emigrating to Australia (where he is very happy).

Yet none of the above prompted any great criticism at the time because that was the monocultural Britain of 1964. Many will deplore the brazenly patronising views towards women for whom life is clearly expected to revolve around child-raising rather than career. 

Few will mourn the narrow professional aspirations of the poorer children when they are leaving school in the 1970s. ‘What does university mean?’ asks care home child, Paul.

Equally jarring is the way that small, privately educated boys are encouraged to voice arrogant generalities about poor people and expensive schools.

John Brisby is almost a caricature of snooty privilege as he progresses via Westminster School and Christchurch, Oxford, to the Bar and life as a QC (now KC) via a spot of beagling.

Like the other privately educated boys, he later bitterly complains about the perception that it has all been handed on a plate without any reference to academic hard graft. Only much later does the series show him as a mellowing, dedicated philanthropist working with charities in his mother’s native Bulgaria.

Another posh boy, Charles Furneaux, ex-Marlborough and Durham, was so appalled by his portrayal that he had a furious showdown with Apted after 21 Up, never spoke to him again and went on to become a successful documentary maker in his own right. 

He will finally reappear next week in the last series with some closing thoughts.

The project does not reveal any upward mobility though, happily, the care home boys go on to enjoy great happiness as family men. Symon Basterfield now not only has 12 grandchildren of his own but has fostered 120 more.

Yet all the way through comes the sense that we all have to make our own luck, try our best, move on and up. 

East End boy Tony always dreamed of being a jockey – and he wells up again in the new series aged 70 as he recalls his one race against the great Lester Piggott before it all turned sour.

Yet he is a classic Thatcherite by the time of 28 Up. There we see him driving a London cab, taking his young family on foreign holidays, learning golf and dreaming of roles as an actor (later securing a drive-on part as a cabbie in EastEnders).

We will also see Peter Davies, a disillusioned musician/teacher-turned-lawyer, still writing music, musicals and books at 70, still dreaming of greater things.

East End girl Sue Davis finds retirement from university administration ‘hard’ and is seeking ‘a new direction’.

We will see an especially happy ending with Bruce Bolden. A studious Army officer’s son who once dreamed of being a missionary to ‘civilise’ poor Africans, he goes on to Oxford via St Paul’s, tries City life and ends up teaching maths in an East End comprehensive which he loves.

It is the same school the three Cockney girls, Jackie, Sue and Lynn, were at in 1964. The show therefore underlines the extraordinary demographic change in the East End. 

The area was all-white when the girls first appeared aged seven. By the time Bruce is teaching there in 1984, many if not most of his pupils are Asian. Today, the borough is just 24 per cent white.

By his 50s, however, he is married with two sons and teaching maths at a private school in St Albans. 

Now 70, he has retired to the seaside and, in the final series, we find him singing in the choir, volunteering for the RNLI and reflecting that he has never been happier.

Looking at some of the Facebook comments under ITV’s announcement of the new series, ‘Abdul Aziz’ says Bruce was his ‘inspirational’ teacher and ‘one of the reasons I became a teacher myself’. In every way, a life fulfilled.

This is a piece of history and it teaches certain lessons. One of them is clear: A hand up is worth so much more than a handout.

• 70 Up starts on Tuesday, September 15, at 9pm on ITV1 and ITVX.