A seven-year-old who never stopped talking

In 1964, teachers at an east London primary school picked Jackie Bassett for a TV programme. She was filmed skipping down the road with her little sister.

“They only picked me because I never stopped talking”

Built on a Jesuit saying

7 Up interviewed 14 children from wildly different backgrounds, testing the old line that a child is formed by seven. It was meant as one snapshot of the British class system.

“Give me the child until he is seven and I will show you the man”

Nobody knew what it was

The Granada crew simply turned up at the school. The children answered questions about boys and their futures with no sense that anything was starting.

“We didn't really know what we were doing, we had no idea what was happening”

The answers that stuck

Neil wanted to be an astronaut or a coach driver. Paul worried about a wife who would make him eat his greens. Bruce wished he could see his father, 6,000 miles away in Rhodesia.

“heart's desire is to see my daddy who is 6,000 miles away”

A researcher who came back

Paul Almond directed the first film with a young researcher, Michael Apted, helping pick the children. Seven years later Apted decided to find them again.

Terrible footage, brilliant idea

Apted called the teenage instalment dreadful because nobody would say anything. The audience turned up anyway, and he understood what he had.

“despite the film not being very good, everyone was interested in it”

Hollywood, then home again

Apted went on to direct a James Bond film, The World Is Not Enough. He still called the Up series his most significant achievement and returned to it every seven years.

Lives that refused the script

Neil's childhood dreaminess gave way to depression, isolation and homelessness, then a Liberal Democrat council seat at 42 and a lay preacher's role at 49. Jackie swore off children and became a mother of three boys.

The question Jackie waited 18 years to answer

At 21, newly married, she was asked whether she had met enough men first. She spent the rest of that interview staring at the floor.

“I was really angry… you wouldn't have asked some of the other people in this programme that question.”

He never asked about politics

Jackie felt Apted was stuck on domestic questions for the women, missing how much had changed around him.

“I think he still thought we were all in the kitchen”

Others pushed back harder

Barrister John Brisby called the show a pill of poison injected every seven years and stopped sitting for interviews. Charles Furneaux walked away after 21 Up following a row Apted admitted going berserk in.

“little pill of poison”

The flaw he owned

Apted called it a horrible error that the original cast of 14 included only four women. The selection made in 1964 shaped everything that followed.

“horrible error”

Two empty chairs

Lynn Johnson died in 2013. Nick Hitchon, the Yorkshire farm boy who wanted to find out about the moon, became a nuclear fusion professor in Wisconsin and died of cancer in 2023.

“was an expert in nuclear fusion who eventually accepted that he would always be best known for appearing in a ground-breaking TV documentary”

Symmetry at seventy

Asif Kapadia took over after Apted's death in 2021, and Jackie found his interviews felt like conversations. Now in Norfolk and at peace, she says the ending is right.

“We started at seven, we finished at 70 - and that's it.”