DeeDee

Anyone else view this series?? I just finished another disc of this DVD and am finding it simply fascinating!

Starts in 1964 with 14 seven year old children from a variety of backgrounds from all over England. It follows them through aged 42. Each seven years, director Michael Apted interviews each of them about basically the same subjects.

Anyone else?

alya

DeeDee

Is this the series where they interview 'Upper Class' children who attend Public schools and 'Lower Class' children who attend the state schools and others in-between?

If it is, I saw an update a couple of years ago, it’s fascinating what people make of their lives and doesn’t seem to matter what your background is. Some of the 'rich' kids fail and some of the 'poor' kids succeed.

I saw the up-date when they turned 40, very interesting to watch.

alya

or was that 42

CAPH52

I remember seeing it years ago. Probably on PBS? Very interesting to know it's on DVD. It's something I'd definitely consider watching with my kids (almost 16 and almost 20). Did you rent it? If so, is it available at a chain like Blockbuster or Hollywood?

TRSW

CAPH52 - I dont know about Blockbuster or Hollywood, but you can get it at netflix.com. It is titled "42 Up" in the documentary section.

Tom

CAPH52

Thanks, Tom!

flanneruk

49 Up, which is being made at the moment, is due to be shown on ITV this autumn.

In some ways, it was the first reality TV programme when it first came out, and I remember being almost shocked at 7 Up's exposure of real children's lives. TV documentaries then were about Egyptian presidents or zoo quests for armadillos.

Now though, in the days of Big Brother, it's just another fly-on-the-wall among zillions. My sense of it is that it's now a lot more interesting to the film-making community than it is to viewers: even 7 years ago, the highly commercial Granada stopped making 42 Up because it didn't think there was an audience any more, and the BBC took the project over (producing what I remember as some pretty yawn-making TV). My understanding is that the series' business model - originally entirely about British TV audiences - is now far more dependent on US art house cinema admissions and DVD income after it's been shown on TV here. It's interesting how a series originally intended to show us to ourselves seems to have become a window for foreign audiences into an exotic tribe.

There's also the question of how far the film has distorted the lives of the filmed. It seems no coincidence that the dropout rate is highest among the more affluent subjects, who might be assumed to have less to gain from being followed round by cameras every seven years.

Diana57

I've recently seen four parts of this series (21, 28, 35 and 42), and found them very interesting. I doubt that I could have been as candid as the interviewees, or as articulate in answering questions about my own life. Each film includes footage of earlier interviews, and by 42 Up, one has seen the same clips several times. I understand that the director wanted to give us a better sense of how the subjects' lives have changed, but for me, this slowed the last two films down somewhat.

Flanneruk, thank you for the background information on the series, and for your perspective. I think you make a good point about the films' "exotic" quality for foreign viewers. The subjects are my age, and I did find myself wondering if a similar documentary about fellow Americans would have been quite so fascinating.

LAwoman

I'm a fan of this series - I find it oddly fascinating, watching clips of the same individual over different periods of their life - childhood, teen, young adult, middle age...I think it was originally meant to be a socialogical study but turned out to have a lot more to say about the individual.

DeeDee

alya,

The interviews are with upper class children who attend elite, boarding schools, working class children who attend local public school (some 'comprehensive' which appears to be more academic?) and two children who live in a children's home and are being educated there.

I work in a public library and I was able to borrow this DVD. It is available on Amazon, also. It is the whole series to date on 5 discs. Starts with 7 up (7 yr old) and follows up with 7 up plus, 21 up, 28 up, 35 up and 42 up.

I am finding it extraordinarily well-done and certainly an unusual and provocative introspective on the upbringing of these youth in England. Fascinating!

DeeDee

Also, CAPH52, the entire series is entitled "The UP Series." The 42 Up that you described would be the latest single update, when the subjects were filmed at age 42. They are now being interviewed at age 49 for a new segment that will be released in 2006.

I searched the internet for availability for rental. Blockbuster has these online. You might also check with your local library. Our library system has 2 copies of the whole set.

CAPH52

Thanks, DeeDee.

OReilly

DeeDee:

The series is superb! The first one we watched was “28”, just after it was released and then sought out and watched the previous ones and subsequently watched “35” and “42” . Recently, one of the channels (in Canada) played the entire series, back-to-back, and I cancelled all activity for the day and watched from beginning to end. I found it fascinating to watch all in one sitting, as it forced me to review my own life in the same manner. I think that is the real strength of series: It forces the participants in the experiment to review their lives at particular points and, by doing so, forces the audience to do the same.

Personally, I think it the best documentary series I have ever watched, and the most disturbing. One character in particular stays with me (the lovely intelligent young child from Liverpool, that ended up homeless and seriously disturbed). At 35, we did not think he would make it, but was “adopted” by the “missionary” and, by 42, seemed to be on the road to survival. But, I will be interested to see how it all works out.

Flanneruk: I look forward to “49” !

How accurate is it as social commentary on England during the period?: They say that the very act of observing an experiment alters its outcome, and I think this is somewhat true of this series. At least one participant commented that one year before the dreaded “7”, he/she realizes that she will be under the microscope again. This MUST make the participants more aware about the passing of time and their achievements and failures and must cause some catharsis in their lives. I have tremendous respect for the participants that continue with the experiment because of this intrusion into their lives.


Regards Ger

LAwoman

Another interesting note - if you check the DVD reviews on Amazon - you'll see a review from one of the participants in the series. It's my favorite "character" - the scientist who's now living in Minnesota. I think of all the participants, he's the one who most defied his childhood environment.

flanneruk

Ger:

You question about accuracy (and I guess typicality) is very good. Apart from the fact that this kind of film inevitably changes the people it's filming, we know that Apted dramatically bends the truth to suit his objectives. There's an interview on the web with Nick that describes - with much greater mildness than most of us would if we were being traduced so spectacularly - how the process worked and how his life is being simply misrepresented (http://chronicle.com/temp/reprint.ph...2lmvcgzqnr38p3)

It's interesting to understand why this series has a particular reason for, frankly, lying.

The production company, Granada TV, was a very unusual TV company in the early 1960s. It had the major commercial TV franchise for Northern England (an area it then modestly described as "Granadaland&quot, and set out to keep that franchise by positioning itself as TV for intellectuals. It produced - apart from Coronation Street in the days when it was the most intelligent, sensitive and well-written soap in the English-speaking world - incisive drama and left-leaning, well-funded, political documentaries. So at franchise review time, the great and good were always reassured that Reithian values were being preserved on at least one commercial TV station, however much vulgar populist junk was being produced by Lew Grade and his like elsewhere (the nature of Britain's commercial TV system in the 1960s was that Granada made more money the more vulgar and populist the programmes other stations made. The trick, above all, was to keep the franchise).

The station was hugely profitable, and paid its producers and directors well. But to be a producer or director, you really needed to have politics similar to the owner, Sidney Bernstein: the controller of its flagship documentary programme started life by doing his bit to destroy Glasgow's docks through his naive, tunnel-visioned, Trotskyite militancy (the thug concerned was ultimately put into the House of Lords by B Liar, but, well, what's a principle between friends?)

According to the Bernstein orthodoxy, Britain was irredeemably socially immobile (no-one bothered trying to explain why, in that case, the immigrant Bernsteins got so rich, but asking questions wasn't the way to get on in Bernstein's Granada). So the point of 7Up was to illustrate "factually" the myth of social immobility that Coronation Street was romanticising.

Now, of course, in virtually every society, most poor people are the children of the poor and most rich people are the children of the rich. The only exception to this rule is when revolutions, foreign invasion or hyperinflation steal property from the rich and hand it to the friendsa of the new rulers. But people still move around - and actually for most of the past 500 years, more so in Britain in in most countries in the world (you don't build the greatest empire the world's ever known by failing to exploiot your nation's talent.)

But it's long suited left-leaning Brits to believe in immobility, and it's suited many Americans to swallow the myth of British social immobility.

But, if it had ever been true, 1962 - the year 7Up was made - was the year the myth became simple nonsense. Apart from the torrent of working-class talent pouring into Britain's arts and entertainment (1962 was the year "Love Me Do" got into the charts), the Conservative party began to fall apart, leading inevitably to Labour's taking power in 1964, since when we've never had a toff in any senior government position. Far from being as unusual as the Up series implies, Nick's move from rural poverty to Oxford, for example, was extremely common in his generation (in the early 70s, most Oxford undergraduates came from state schools, though we've regressed on this since: the system of university grants actually privileged the poor, and Oxbridge's ruthless meritocracy wanted the brightest undergraduates, having little interest in the cerebrally challenged children of alumni)

Why does Apted get away with this claptrap? Well in a way he doesn't, because British networks aren't that interested in showing more of this dead socialism. But of course he hasn't lived in Britain for decades, and he makes his money from purveying a fantasy world to Americans that gratifies them just like PG Wodehouse's fantasy world.

Trouble is, it bears just as little connection to reality as PG Wodehouse, and isn't a millionth as funny or well-written.

DeeDee

Now that I have completely finished this series, I have read all the comments on this thread. Enjoyed the Chronicle article referenced here. I also found the review on Amazon that LAwoman notes. It was a bit difficult to find since he posted the review on the 42 Up chapter. Here's what he (Nick) had to say:

"I am one of the people in this video - so I have strong feelings of various kinds about it. There's no denying it is powerful stuff - Roger Ebert lists this series among `The Great Movies' on his web site (right after `2001, a Space Odyssey' - which amazed me!)

What is good about it is that (first) the old film is like a time capsule - it's hard to believe we were ever like that; and (second) that it's like time lapse photography of a flower blooming (or something) - you see different things in people when you see their lives pass at high speed. If we saw enough people fast forwarded like this, we might really learn something. Finally, many people appreciate relating it to their own lives.

The bad part is that it is intensely humiliating to be shown answering the most personal questions I have ever seen anybody have to answer on TV. I find it really hard to watch the tapes at all. (So don't get the tape - let me sell you a book on engineering!)

(By the way - Apted did not direct the early stuff; he was involved, but it was his first job out of college.) --"