Quotes of the Day

Imagine that, at age seven, you were chosen for a research project, in which, every seven years, you would be quizzed about your life's intimate details: the tests you failed, the dreams you pursued or abandoned, the jobs and loves you lost. Not only that — your reactions would be shown on television in your home country and in movie theaters around the world. Think of it. Indentured for life, because your first- or second-grade teacher pushed you in front of a camera.

That's the pact that 14 English children unknowingly signed in the fall of 1963 when Michael Apted and Gordon McDougall, two researchers for the Granada TV public affairs show World in Action, selected them to appear in a 40-min. documentary called Seven Up!, directed by Paul Almond. The kids were chosen to represent English classes and regions: Jackie, Lynn and Sue from a London council estate, John, Andrew and Charles from a Kensington boarding school, Paul and Simon (originally spelled Symon) from a charity home, Neil and Peter from a Liverpool suburb, Suzy from a titled family, Nicholas from the Yorkshire dales, rough-and-tumble Tony from the East End, ethereal Bruce from divorced upper-class parents.

For one evening — May 5, 1964 — they charmed and, with a few of their kids-say-the-darnedest-things observations, alarmed the viewing public. They then retreated into what they must have thought would be a lifetime of video anonymity.

But when the kids turned 14, Apted convened them again for "an interim report," 7 Plus Seven. That made the habit official, and every seven years since the British telly audience has watched the tykes grow up and old, take their lumps, fight life to a draw — and talk about almost all of it — in a unique string of bio-docs. The series now comprises 21 (1977), 28 Up (1984), 35 Up (1991), 42: forty two up (1998) and 49 Up (2005), which opened in U.S. theaters last month. The latest essay is now available on DVD from First Run Features, which boxed the first six programs as The Up Series.

Here, then, is a popular, long-running television series with only seven episodes; a social document that, with its next installment in 2012, will have spanned a half-century; a research project with no pretense to scientific method but a compelling sense of stretching the particulars of these few people into generalizations about the English character; and a family reunion with people we've never met but know more about than we do about our extended families, or most of the people we work with. Here too is the show that, for better or worse, created a genre — reality TV — and raised it to sociological and cinematic art.

A TOUCH OF CLASS

It happens that, in the past two months, my TIME.com work has been awash in Englishness: not just in the Up films but in the humor of Monty Python's Flying Circus and the royal satire of the new film The Queen. I also participated in a South Bank Show about Nick Park's Wallace and Gromit who, although they are made of plasticine (and one, a dog, says nary a word), speak eloquently to the English traits of gamely soldiering on through life's trials, many of them self-inflicted.

All of these entertainments find satiric fun in the inequities and absurdities of the English class system. But it is not so much fun to those in the lower castes. At mid-century, critics of the system saw class as a dungeon from which few escaped into the empyrean of recognized achievement: Oxford and Cambridge, the law and politics, banking and the higher arts. Then, in 1962-63, came a few hints that Britain might be opening up. The country was enjoying a pop-arts renaissance, spurred mostly by children of the working and lower-middle classes, in music (the Beatles and their spawn), art (David Hockney), fashion (Mary Quant, Twiggy) and photography (David Bailey). Might the U.K. become as receptive to upward mobility as the supposedly class-blind U.S.?

Tim Hewitt, executive producer of World in Action, didn't think so. On the commentary for 42, Apted recalls the genesis of the program: that Hewitt "wanted to examine the English class system, by which society or the class into which you were born really determined the opportunities you had in life." (Apted, 22 at the time, might have demurred — he was a lower-middle-class kid who got a scholarship to read history and the law at Cambridge — but he doesn't say if he did.) "We wanted to get a good cross-section of English society... the idea being that out of the mouths of seven-year-old children we might learn some truths about English society: what they thought about each other, their ambitions, their thoughts on money, color, race, sex. They might give some insight into whether English society was really changing..."

So Seven Up! was agenda journalism. The show seemed to revel in painting the three public-school chappies as upper-class tyro twits — especially young Andrew, who said of his morning reading material, "I like my newspaper because I've got shares in it" (a comment he later said had been a joke) and volunteered his opinion on pop music: "I think the Beatles are mad because they make too much noise, and their hair style is so bad." Suzy, when asked about black people, replied with a sleepy-eyed smile, "I don't know anybody who's colored. And I don't want to know anybody who's colored, thank you very much." (Seven years later, a much less flirtatious Suzy offered this addendum on the race question: "I haven't got anything against colored people, but I wouldn't worry if I never met one until they day I died.")

Clearly rooting for the underdog, Seven Up! found its early breakout star (tough Tony) and two of its sentimental favorites (wistful Simon and little-lost-boy Paul) among its lowest-class subjects. The posh lads had their scholastic futures mapped out: their parents had prepped them for Marlborough and Cambridge. But Simon, when asked whether he hoped to go to university, said no: "I'll just walk around, and see what I can find." And poor, dear Paul looked stumped. "What does university mean?"

If the show's casting directors took care in choosing representatives of different classes, they were less enlightened or prescient in matters of gender and race. Only four of the 14 kids were girls: Suzy and the three from a council estate (cursorily referred to in Seven Up! as "Jackie and her friends"). Simon is the only Anglo-African — his mother white, his father black. Apted and McDougall didn't think to find a child with Indian or Pakistani roots, although families of those nationalities had been streaming into Britain for 15 years. These days especially, Apted must regret the omission.

Three other boys stood out. Neil had irrepressible high spirits and a budding wanderlust. If he couldn't be an astronaut, he said, "I'm going to take people to the country, and sometimes to the seaside." Bruce, an angelic blond boy with a solemn demeanor, came from a well-to-do family but, having been exiled to a boarding school in Surrey, radiated loneliness and idealism. "My heart's desire," he said soulfully, "is to see my daddy." His father was in Rhodesia, which may have had something to do with his stated ambition to go to Africa "and try and teach people who are not civilized to be more or less good." The world's most adorable idealist, Bruce was also a Christian socialist: "I think we should give all, some, most of our money to the poor people." Nick, finally, seemed to know both what he wanted to do ("When I grow up, I'd like to find out all about the moon and all that") and how to handle a TV journalist's prying questions. "I don't want to answer that," he said, as if the camera belonged to a paparazzo. "I don't answer those kinds of questions."

UP AND OLD

Each of the films, and each interview within the film, begins with clips of the children as we first saw them. The series (along with much of popular culture and psychology) suggests that seven is a state of perfection, an apogee from which a child declines in beauty, ambition and innocence. At that age, children are both guileless truthtellers and natural performers, which is why Seven Up! remains the most effortlessly ingratiating program in the series. And the most poignant, since succeeding episodes have shown how they — we — lose more in growing up than is gained. The pretty petal doesn't open; it closes, or withers, or becomes a weed.

If you want to embarrass an adult, give him an extended look at himself as an adolescent. When Apted corralled the kids for 7 Plus Seven, they were truer to their age than to their respective classes. At seven most of the children had an unself-conscious boldness; at 14, their eyes hardly met the camera's. At seven they were active; at 14, guarded, at times sullen — as if they were now on to Apted's game, and loath to play it. Some of the kids practically had to be cracked to come out of their shells. Nicholas buries his head between his knees; and Suzy, interviewed on the lawn of her father's 4,000-acre estate in Scotland, is so uncommunicative that the camera moves away from her to see her pet retriever fetch a dead rabbit. Even Tony, who usually loves the limelight, sounds curt and ungiving.

This is the way so many adolescents cope with the changes and urges their bodies are forcing them through. But some of Apted subjects are ready to banter. The upper-class boys have added poise to their prejudices. John especially: Apted asks him, "Are you ambitious," and he says yes. "What for?" "Fame. And power." "What sort of power?" "Political power." (He says that when he joins Parliament, "I wouldn't allow any strikes.") Prodded to analyze how he's changed in seven years, John sagely replies, "One grows so slowly that one never notices." And when asked if he thinks England will change, he says, "Not very much. England is too English, if you see what I mean." It's the answer the series wants to hear.

The changes are greatest in the early episodes, from childhood (seven) to adolescence (14) to early maturity (21). Later, the adventures are mostly domestic: the accretion and shedding of spouses, the raising of nuclear and post-nuclear families. You see waistlines growing, hairlines receding. You meet their children at birth, seven, 14 and 21. The series becomes less a window into their lives, more a mirror into ours. For it is only through the severest denial that we can think that they have grown older, been cramped diminished by life, while we have stayed miraculously young, rich in achievement, richer in promise.

WHERE ARE THEY NOW?

If you're new to the series and want to get a hint of the density of lives rushing past, see the first two episodes (they're just 40 and 52 mins., respectively), then 28 Up and 49 Up. Here's a bit of what you'll find.

Tony, the endearingly mouthy Cockney, rode horses, got married, drove a London taxi (as did his wife Debbie), did some TV bits as an actor, survived a marital crisis (due to his "regretful behavior") and made enough money to buy a holiday home in Spain for his wife, their children and three grandchildren. Tony's one regret is that the East End "changed"; it went brown. "Other cultures," he says, in one of the few overtly political comments on what has become a very domesticated series, "are buying all my old traditions up."

Jackie, who has rheumatoid arthritis, was married and divorced is now raising a son. Sue, another single mother, is doing the same. Lynn worked as a children's librarian out of a mobile van; she now helps mentally challenged children and worries about the end of government funding. Suzy, the posh girl, has a successful marriage.

Of the rich boys, Andrew went to Charterhouse and Cambridge, as he predicted; became a solicitor, as he predicted; at 35 a partner; at 49 took a job as an executive at an industrial gas company. John became a Queen's Counsel, married the daughter of an ambassador to Bulgaria and devotes himself to charities for Bulgarian children because, he says, "Who wants to be the richest corpse in the graveyard?" But he hasn't lost his corrosive upper-crust wit: "I reckon if I shoot the horses, shoot the wife, and only drink Bulgarian wine, I may be able to retire at age 94 or something."

Simon, one of the two boys from a charity home, works as a baggage handler near Heathrow Airport. He has wed twice. The first marriage, to Yvonne, produced five children; in the second, to Vianessa, he become a foster parent. Simon's and Paul's histories suggest that they weren't schooled in ambition. "I'm very laid back," he tells Apted. "As [my wife] always says, if I go any further back I'll fall over." Paul, the second charity case, went to Australia and worked as a laborer. He married Susan, a hairdresser, and had two kids, one of whom went to university, the other of whom gave them two grandchildren. Paul never gained a sense of self; in one episode he asked, "Why would Susan want to be with someone as boring as me?" And when Apted quizzed Susan on what attracted her to Paul, she replied, "His helplessness."

The challenge of expressing feelings has become a major motif in the series as the subjects cope both with the flattening out of the career or family arcs and with their emergence every seven years to talk about themselves. Nick, who read Physics at Oxford and got a job as teacher and researcher in nuclear fusion at the University of Wisconsin, acknowledges that "I don't quite get how other people feel about things sometimes." He thinks he fits into an unemotional profession and he poses the joke: "How can you tell if an engineer is an extrovert, and the answer is: He looks at your shoes when he's talking to you." After divorcing UW teacher Jackie (they had one son), he married Chris, a starchier Jessica Lange. When Apted asks Chris, "Is he sexy?" you can see Nick cringe.

Bruce also became a teacher, After university, he put his early Christian altruism to action, instructing poor children in Bangladesh and London. He finally felt eroded by the experience and took a job at an upscale boys' school. In middle age he married Penny and had two sons. About his marriage he says, "If Penny really wants to give me a hard time, she'd say, ‘Talk to me about your feelings.'"

Any documentarian is a dramatist waiting for something to happen. To put the matter less prettily, he's a ghoul waiting for a photogenic victim. Apted got that with Neil, so vital and cheerful at seven, pensive at 14 but hopeful of going to Oxford (he didn't get in)... and at 21 homeless! And most unnervingly agitated, while insisting that he'd "love to be in politics or something." Seven years later he was homeless in Scotland. (Apted: "Do you worry about your sanity?" Neil: "Other people sometimes worry about it.") At he was living in a Shetland Island council house. (Apted: "Do you ever think you're going mad?" Neil: "Oh, I don't think it. I know it.") At 42, he'd returned to London, where Bruce generously put him up. Neil did end up in politics: as a Liberal Democratic representative in Hackney; and at 49 he was a District Councillor in the county of Cumbria.

Speaking with the intensity of Tony Perkins in Psycho's stuffed-bird sequence, and explaining with a pained precision his journey through life, Neil is aware of the figure he cuts in the series. "I did have one girlfriend for close on two years," he tells Apted, "so maybe I'm not as completely hopeless a character as might appear to be the case." His melancholy sense of drama — the drama that happens to people — makes him ideally suited for his second job: as a lay reader in church. He says he "preferred the Old Testament to the New Testament, because in the Old Testament God is very unpredictable. And that's how I've seen Him in my life." Yet he retains a flinty sort of optimism, or is it stoicism? "I see that life comes once," he says, "and it's quite short, and you have to appreciate what's good in it."

INSIDE UP

I wondered about the subjects' participation in the series. Here are some answers from Wikipedia: "All interviews since have been voluntary, the participants are paid, and only their first names are used in the programme." In fact it's a shock, almost a violation of trust, to see the subjects full names listed as the stars of the Up DVDs on amazon.com.

Apted has to be considerate of their feelings, in part because without them the series ends, in part because he thinks of them as friends. He keeps in touch with them during their civilian years, he says, then gets down to business about a year before the next show's airing. When he makes the I'm-baaaack call, he told AP in 2004, "They all try to torture me and say they don't want to do it." But he's aware of the show's "tremendous invasion" in their lives. "They have to kind of step up and be judged by a pretty large audience, because it's a huge matter in Britain when these films come out. It can't be easy to have your last seven years judged by the nation."

The producer of any successful film knows how hard it is to get the original cast back for sequels, and Apted has had to engage in plenty of negotiation with his subjects. Again per Wikipedia, "Paul only agreed to take part in 35 Up if Michael Apted arranged for him and his family to visit England as part of the filming of their segment." Nick was flown back from Wisconsin to Britain for 35 and 42. And John "would only appear in 35 Up under the condition that a member of the Up Series crew other than Apted interview him." (John took a vacation for 42, then returned for the latest installment.)

Peter, who had been at school in Liverpool with Neil, dropped out after 28 Up; he became a lawyer and plays in a band called The Good Intentions. Another of the public school boys, Charles found a career in journalism and BBC documentaries. But after 21 Up he bowed out of the most famous documentary series in British history. In 2005, Wikipedia informs us, Apted "revealed that Charles had attempted to sue him when he refused to remove Charles's likeness from the archive sequences in 49 Up."

In 49 Up Apted foregrounds the issue of his subjects' uncomfortable celebrity. Suzy finds the experience "very difficult, very painful; not an experience I've enjoyed in any way.... We were all landed in it and most of us have, for whatever reason, chosen to go through with it.... Hopefully I'll reach my half-century next year, and I shall bow out." Lynn speaks of Russ, her husband of 30 years: "He's my soulmate, he's my partner. We respect each other. Hence, he's not here, and you will not see him on this film, because he has always always felt that the intrusion into our private life that this causes is too much."

Jackie assumes the role of the shrink's shrink when she chastised Apted: "You will edit this program as you see fit. I've got no control over that. You definitely come across as 'this is your idea of what you want to do, and how you see us,' and that's how you portray us. This one may be, may be, the first one that's about us rather than about your perception of us.... There are a lot of the times that I sit and cringe when I watch those programs, not just for me but for other people. ... Other people, quite of their own free will, will talk about their marriages or their divorces, or the state of their lives. I don't think you should be into that." Then, as if she were a character in a novel and her storyline didn't fit the author's plan, she tells Apted, "I don't think you ever really expected me to turn out the way I have."

And some in the group have adapted to their strange notoriety with as much grace as resignation. In 42 Up Nick smiled as he said, "My ambition as a scientist is to be more famous for doing science than for being in this film. But unfortunately, Michael, it's not gonna happen."

OLD FRIENDS

Does age come faster, less kindly, to the English? At 49, most of the Uppers look 59. The gravity of their years (and perhaps of their celebrity) has put sag lines in their faces and slowed their steps. Their big financial moves are to secure retirement homes. They seem prepared quite early for senior citizenship.

Watching the premature and apparently unself-conscious aging of the participants, I wonder if, in the fifth or sixth year of each cycle, they say to themselves, "Time to get a rinse, lose a stone or two, pull my marriage together and straighten out my kids." But that may be the bias of an American, relying on the superficial, the lure of eternal adolescence, more than your average Brit.

Bless the subjects for not getting beautified and Botoxed before they're ready for their septennial closeup. And bless their openness or naivete for continuing with a project that pries open some of their more difficult accommodations to life. It's as if, when they made their deal with the devil, or their recording angel, part of the pact was to be honest, to present themselves as they are, and hope that Apted would be as honest in presenting them.

But that's the trick of reality television. It isn't real. Even assuming that Apted wants to be faithful to his subjects' dreams, moods and rancors, we have to wonder what important elements are lost as he reduces the two days of interviews he does with each subject to 10 or 15 mins. Any writer or editor knows this: subtlety is what's lost in compression. Sometimes the truth, whatever that is in understanding a person's life, is also at risk.

I have no idea what small lies or significant evasions the Uppers or Apted are concealing. But I'd guess that the series gets at the larger truth of Englishness: of reticence and acceptance, of class and an easy or biting humor. "There are many things that might have happened in my life that haven't happened," Neil says, "and there is little point in being regretful and angry about it." To which an American viewer might respond, Why the hell not? And the answer, I think, is: because they're English.

There is an inevitable poignancy to a 42-year group portrait — all those possibilities unfulfilled, all those roads with dour detours. Beyond that, the Up series has created, across classes, a community out of these children, who seem figures from a fairy tale: blessed, or cursed, when they were seven, and emerging every seven years thereafter to endure another public challenge. It's almost Harry Potterish. By overcoming their natural desire for privacy, by revealing themselves unsparingly, these septennial TV celebrities have become, in a modest but modern way, true movie heroes.

• Richard Corliss
• The groundbreaking, four-decade group portrait of the English comes to DVD