One line, every episode

A Jesuit motto has opened every instalment of the Up series since the beginning. The whole project is an attempt to prove it or break it.

“Give me a child until he is seven, and I will give you the man.”

Back every seven years

Director Michael Apted returned to the same 14 people every seven years, starting in 1964 when they were all seven years old.

The last time

70 Up is the final film, and Apted is not behind it. He died in 2021, leaving the participants to close the story themselves.

Does it still ring true

At 70 they look back and test the motto against their own lives. Some recognise the child they were, others barely know him.

Bruce meets his younger self

Bruce Balden was at boarding school when he was picked, and became a teacher. Watching the boy on screen, he wants to tell him it works out.

“I see a rather lost soul. I want to reassure him that it will be a ride, but life is going to be all right.”

A father far away

At seven, Bruce wanted one thing: to see his dad, a soldier posted to Southern Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe.

The poem that came late

In the final film Bruce reads a poem in which his father sets out what he felt. The distance had not been one way.

“He missed me as much as I missed him. If I'd known, I'd have made more of an effort to make up for lost time.”

Built to test class

The original programme was an examination of the British class system. The children were chosen as a cross-section, not as individuals.

Who the fourteen were

Three girls and a boy from the East End, a girl from wealthier London, two boys from a children's home, four public schoolboys, a Yorkshire farmer's son and two from suburban Liverpool.

Picked for talking

East End girl Jackie Bassett got in because she would not stop chattering. Six decades on she says nothing about that has changed.

“In our house, if you didn't speak up you didn't get heard. I don't think I've changed.”

Jackie's long road

Married at 19, divorced, married again, moved to Scotland, had three children, divorced again, and raised them as a single mother.

The one regret

Jackie weighs it all up without bitterness. The thing she would change is stopping her education when she did.

“Things could have been better, but things could have been a lot worse.”

Two did not reach 70

Lynn, one of the East End girls, died in 2013. Nick, the Yorkshire boy who became a nuclear scientist, died three days after filming 70 Up.

Neil, the hardest years

The Liverpool boy was homeless by 28 Up and in a council house by 35 Up. A short marriage had ended by the time 63 Up was filmed.

Now living in France

Neil has settled abroad and looks back with a diagnosis the cameras never named at the time. He thinks depression has been there all along.

Not everyone stayed

Most turned up every seven years, but some skipped episodes, walked away entirely, or disliked the version of themselves that reached the screen.

The lawyer's objection

John Brisby, a public schoolboy who became a barrister, felt the films cast him as a symbol rather than a person.

“set up to represent an outmoded class system that had no validity in the modern world”

Nothing was staged

Bruce compares it with what television does now and says the Up crew never engineered a moment. The brief was simply to talk.

“Some reality TV now is very contrived. We had none of that.”

Pride, not regret

Bruce says being filmed never altered a decision he made, and he would not undo any of it. What began as an experiment became a record of a country.

“I take pride in being part of what's turned out to be a social document about Britain.”

Where it ends

70 Up airs Tuesday at 9pm on ITV1. After 62 years, there will be no next visit.