Deborah Lipp

The Up Series 9/10
Every seven years, a documentary crew visits the same fourteen people. Seven Up! was made in 1964, when the subjects were seven years old.

Over the course of the past four weeks or so, I’ve seen most of this series, starting with Seven Up! and 7 Plus Seven, and then 21 Up, 28 Up, and 35 Up.*

The brilliance of the Up Series is that the premise is so startlingly good that even when the filming falters, it’s still compelling. Director Michael Apted’s questions are sometimes lame, sometimes too leading, sometimes too ordinary, and occasionally offensive. Yet the opportunity to visit with these people every seven years (or every couple of days, in my case) has kept me transfixed. The strongest episode so far has been 28 Up. With 7, 14, and 21 you see people growing up. They are at various points of self-discovery and self-knowledge. Some have known themselves with absolute clarity since they were first filmed. Some, at 21, still have no clue as to who they are. But at 28, they are solidly adult, and each, to the extent of his or her abilities, has arrived. The juxtaposition is so wonderful to watch. By 35, there are fewer changes (which is to be expected) and the film drags, as too much time is spent rehashing. There are more clips from previous episodes than new footage. In addition, three people are missing. For one, there’s a brief explanation (‘Charles doesn’t want to be in this movie’). But Peter and Symon have simply disappeared with nary a comment. Were they unfindable? Dead? I looked them up on Wikipedia because I was so bothered (apparently, they come back for 42 Up). Bad direction, if you ask me, to just omit them.

Despite the fact that the premise of the documentaries is to say something about the British class system and educational opportunities, what we’re watching is something larger, something like the human condition. It’s the smallness and ordinariness that makes it somehow so large.

I guess everyone who watches is going to have favorites. John has annoyed me since he was seven and at thirty-five, even as he is sharing his urgent interest in charity, I am still annoyed. Tony, if the various Internet commentaries are to be believed, is everyone’s favorite. A happy-go-lucky guy who embraces life, he is perhaps the most consistent of the fourteen, recognizably the same person all the way through. I am also very fond of Nick, who at seven, a small boy on a Yorkshire farm and the only child his age in his entire village, expressed an interest in studying science. By twenty-eight (and thirty-five) he is a professor of physics at the University of Wisconsin.

And there is the tragedy of Neil, a middle class suburban Liverpool boy who, somewhere around the age of sixteen, became mentally ill and has been, since twenty-one, intermittently homeless and living on the dole. Yet he is there every seven years to share openly about his life.

*I have 42 Up and 49 Up (made in 2006) up next on my Netflix.