I was always fascinated by the 7 Up instalments...maybe coz it coincided with my age... Although the last one, 63 UP a few years ago I found rather boring...a bunch of retirees talking about their children and grand children.. Funny, I talked about that with an old school friend and whether he will still be around for 70 UP and 77 UP..

Funny also how some of the children would refuse to be part of an instalment but then come back again later for another. Then there was the one that wanted to be an astronaut and ended up being a bum living in a caravan with mental health issues, then he tried to be a politician, then a clergyman or something and then finally bought a house in France from his mother's inheritance.



Los Angeles: Michael Apted, a versatile director whose films were as varied as the James Bond picture The World Is Not Enough and the biographical dramas Gorillas in the Mist and Coal Miner's Daughter, and who made his most lasting mark with the Seven Up documentary series, which followed the lives of a group of British people in seven-year intervals for more than a half century, died on Thursday at his home in Los Angeles. He was 79.



Apted, who was British, was a researcher at Granada Television in England when he helped pick the 14 children, all of them 7, who became the subjects of Seven Up!, the initial documentary in the Up series, which was directed by Paul Almond and shown on British television in 1964.

The film was intended as a one-off, but Apted picked up the ball seven years (more or less) later, acting as director of 7 Plus Seven, broadcast in England in late 1970, in which he interviewed the same children, now at a more developed stage of life.

Then came 21 Up in 1977, 28 Up in 1984 and so on, with new instalments arriving every seven years, all directed by Apted. 63 Up was released in 2019.

Collectively, the films became a serial portrait of a group of ordinary people advancing through life, from childhood through adulthood, charting their different paths and changing perspectives. The New York Times in 2019 called it "the most profound documentary series in the history of cinema".


The cast of the Up series at a reunion party when the children reached 21.

In a 2010 interview with The Times, Apted reflected on his one regret about the Up series — that his initial choice of children was unbalanced, 10 boys but only 4 girls — and how his choices of mainstream films might have been a way to compensate for that.


The director Michael Apted with, from left, Jackie Bassett, Lynn Johnson and Susan Davis, three of the subjects of his documentary “28 Up” (1984)


A scene from “Seven Up!” (1964), the first in Mr. Apted’s series of “Up” documentaries.

Full: https://www.smh.com.au/world/north-amer ... 56sv1.html

That was a great series. There was one boy who lived in a council estate and seemed like a total maniac kid and did very well later, while one posh kid ended up a confused wandering hippy.