Michael Apted’s Up series has always been a masterclass in yanking at the heartstrings as it has followed – in seven-year increments – the lives of 14 English people through the ups-and-downs of childhood, adulthood and now old age.
Their stories are by turns riveting and devastating, but it is also the case that in their experiences – those random moments of happiness and disappointment – we can catch reflections of our own lives. They made their plans, the universe got in the way – and all they could do was carry on with as much courage and dignity as they could muster. It could happen to any of us. It is, in fact, happening to all of us, all of the time.
Apted died in 2021 aged 79, leaving Oscar-winning documentarian Asif Kapadia to take up the baton for one final Up documentary, 70 Up (ITV, Tuesday, 9pm), which rejoins the now familiar cast as they enter their eighth decade (several having already died). What’s extraordinary is that they have simultaneously changed profoundly from the children introduced in 1964 and yet have remained completely and entirely themselves.
Those given prime billing in the first of two episodes include perpetual lost boy Neil, so quick and quizzical when introduced in 1964 but someone whose years have been marked by depression and who now lives alone in France – still slightly startled by life. “I wake up every day, not knowing what’s going to happen,” he says in an old interview – and that uncertainty remains the defining register of his existence on earth.
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Apted wanted to be an unseen observer. But the moment his subjects were put on the screen at age seven, television became one of the defining factors of their lives. Some embraced it – cheeky chappy cab driver Tony describes Apted as a “diamond” in his life.
But others feel they were cast as characters. That the audience was encouraged to see them as villains to be heckled. Kapadia, to his credit, rips off the plaster by confronting the fact that the Up films weren’t objective snapshots of people negotiating the stages of life but that they were infused with Apted’s own biases, however artfully couched.
“I haven’t been very happy with the way I’ve been portrayed,” says John, introduced in 1964 as a privileged junior toff and today a retired barrister. “I felt I had been set up as the bogey man to represent an outmoded class system that had no validity in the modern world.”
Kapadia doesn’t try to upstage Apted or impose any narrative structure on 70 Up. He directs in a self-consciously unshowy style: the film goes out of its way not to call attention to itself. He lets the subjects speak for themselves, and though their backgrounds are wildly different, what they have to say is much the same.
Life happens, you get on with it, and then, suddenly, there you are, aged 70, full of regrets – but somehow compelled to keep going. It’s a journey we’re all on, and the morbidly comforting message of 70 Up is that nobody has things figured out and that all we really can do is muddle through as best we can.
