56 and counting: the return of the original reality-TV show

THOSE OF A CERTAIN age can measure their lives to the seven-year beat of the Up series. This week it is at 56 Up, and that title winds you a little. It was a series, after all, that was supposed to watch them grow up. Now it is on the verge of watching them grow old.

In 1964 the first programme, Seven Up, took 14 children, from deliberately divergent classes, on the premise that it wanted to get a glimpse of the England of 2000. Then that date was gloriously futuristic; now it is our nostalgia. Their lives were all promise then; now they are in review. But it long ago became a slow-pulsing soap, a personal story where at first it had been a political one. And, as 49 Up revealed, has become not just about the people it follows but also about the series itself, a mirror held up to its motivations and its effect.

At its core is the 15th participant: its director since 14 Up, Michael Apted.

The series has been “event television” for some decades. Curiously, its commitment to a lifetime-long, multisubject documentary series has in some ways become less grand. It’s not just that we take the concept for granted, and have watched variations emerge through the years – the BBC’s Child of Our Time, RTÉ’s 21st Century Child – but because the average western life is now lived semipublicly, and longitudinally.

Facebook’s Timeline is only the most explicit iteration of the web’s memory of millions of lives.

Yet the Up series has been epic – in a banal, recognisable sort of way. Every seven years their lives are condensed into edited montages before being topped off by an update. The entirety of their ambitions, outcomes, compressed into one package that, even for those born into a privilege they hold on to, can’t help but carry poignancy. Age alone does that.

Each series has brought a certain chasing of dignity from their youth onwards, through their original hopes, then the realities, to their middle-aged audits. It’s obvious that it is not just about the viewer looking in but also about what they see reflected.

But 49 Up was a series in which some explicitly examined their lives as television characters. It happened because it was the era of “reality television”, of which the Up series had inadvertently become a living ancestor. Between 42 Up and 49 Up, the series’s participants had become the watchers, the voyeurs, looking in at the manipulated “reality” of Big Brother and finding a new perspective on their own place in popular culture.

Two of them, Jackie and John, talked about their participation in such direct terms. There were questions about how even the most earnest of documentary series manipulates its subjects, alters their path, forces them to assess themselves in an unnatural way. This seven-year appointment with their past was “painful”, one explained, because “issues get opened up again”.

Yet most have stayed in, partly because Apted appeals to their collegiality: they’re all part of it; they should see it through. Apted was a researcher on the first series and has been at the helm ever since. When he began as a director he was twice their age, an adult, paternalistic, gently questioning children. Over time, that gap has shrunk so that by now – the participants 56, Apted 71 – they will increasingly consider themselves contemporaries.

It has changed the tenor of the interrogation. His control was firmly challenged last time around, and it will be particularly interesting to see if there is a crackle between him and some of those participants this time, or if that bitterness has seeped away. However, similar series have identified that concern as a selling point.

Robert Winston’s Child of Our Time, visiting its subjects annually since birth, has taken a more nakedly scientific approach, the professor’s supposed avuncular nature dropped repeatedly for direct commentary on parenting skills, or grim pronouncements on a child’s development. In its analytical approach it has too often seemed as if scenes should be joined by Winston calling for the “next slide”.

While some deeply regret their involuntary involvement from Seven Up onwards, that series’s flaws make it stronger than anything that could be made now. Sure, it focused on class and missed the importance of feminism, and it has a 1960s racial mix, but that original naivety gives it its texture. Now even seven-year-olds have some understanding of the lure of fame, and programme makers feed the audience’s hunger for entertainment. There would be a carefully selected mix, hewn out of auditions. Parents would push their children aloft on a heartbreaking story or two.

Although, if Big Brother was a shadow over 49 Up, then perhaps The X Factor is the backdrop to the lives of those in 56 Up. A participant who dropped out at 28 is back. He wants to promote his band.

@shanehegarty