The final 70 Up programme will reunite viewers with the people first filmed as seven-year-olds in 1964, as the pioneering series reaches its conclusion with the participants reflecting on six decades of change.
The latest instalment is made without director Michael Apted, who died in 2021. It asks whether the Jesuit saying used to open every episode – “Give me a child until he is seven, and I will give you the man” – has proved true of those followed throughout their lives.
The series began as an examination of the British class system, bringing together children from sharply different backgrounds. The group included youngsters from London’s East End, two children from a home, four public schoolboys, a Yorkshire farmer’s son and two boys from a middle-class suburb of Liverpool.
Bruce Balden was at boarding school when he was selected and went on to become a teacher. Looking back at his younger self, he said: “I do see myself in that seven-year-old.”
He described the boy as “a rather lost soul” and said he would like to reassure him that, despite the difficulties ahead, “life is going to be all right”.
As a child, Bruce had wanted to see more of his father, a soldier in Southern Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe. In the final programme, he reads a poem in which his father explains his feelings for his son.
“He missed me as much as I missed him,” Bruce says. “If I’d known, I’d have made more of an effort to make up for lost time.”
The lives behind 70 Up
Jackie Bassett, who grew up in the East End, was chosen because she was outspoken. “In our house, if you didn’t speak up you didn’t get heard,” she says, adding: “I don’t think I’ve changed.”
She married at 19, later divorced and remarried, moved to Scotland and had three children before becoming a single mother following a second divorce.
“Things could have been better, but things could have been a lot worse,” Jackie says. While there are moments she would rather had not happened, she regrets not pursuing more education.
Her fellow East Ender Lynn died in 2013, while Nick, who was born in Yorkshire and became a nuclear scientist, died three days after filming for 70 Up.
Neil, from Liverpool, has experienced some of the most unsettled circumstances documented by the series. He was homeless by 28 Up, living in a council house by 35 Up and had separated from his wife by 63 Up. He now lives in France and believes he may have suffered from depression throughout his life.
Not all of the original participants appeared in every instalment. Some missed episodes, withdrew from the series or objected to the way they were portrayed. John Brisby, a public schoolboy who became a lawyer, said he felt he had been “set up to represent an outmoded class system that had no validity in the modern world”.
Bruce, however, has no such complaints. “Some reality TV now is very contrived,” he says. “We had none of that. It was just, ‘Tell us what you’re doing, where you’re at, what you’re interested in.’”
He says he cannot say the programme affected the choices he made and has no regrets about taking part. “I take pride in being part of what’s turned out to be a social document about Britain,” he says.
70 Up will air on Tuesday at 9pm on ITV1.
