70 Up Review: ITV’s Farewell to Britain’s Longest Experiment Puts Michael Apted in the Dock
Britain’s longest-running television programme reached its penultimate hour on Tuesday night with a retired barrister telling the camera he never liked the man who made it. That’s the 70 Up review in a sentence, really. ITV’s farewell to the Up series is 90 minutes of archive, a handful of new interviews and one quiet, deliberate decision: to let the people it has followed since 1964 have the last word on Michael Apted. Some of that word is loving. A fair bit of it isn’t.
In This Article
- The 70 Up review verdict, before the history lesson
- Sixty-two years, one question, and no real answer
- The right of reply Michael Apted never gave them
- So is 70 Up just a clip show?
- Nick's last interview, and the quieter lives that stay with you
- What 70 Up says about class in Britain now
- The two things 70 Up gets wrong
- How to watch 70 Up, and the two companion films
And that, more than the tears (there are plenty), is why the first half of 70 Up matters. Part two airs on ITV1 at 9pm on Tuesday 22 September, and episode one is on ITVX now.
The 70 Up review verdict, before the history lesson
Four stars, if you want a number. Not five, because the first episode spends too long in the archive and too little in the present, and the people complaining about that on X have a point. But four, comfortably, because what Asif Kapadia has done with the last chapter of a 62-year project is braver than a tidy farewell would have been. He’s handed the subjects the microphone and let them argue with a dead director.
If you’ve never seen an Up film, start here anyway. The archive does the catching-up for you.
Sixty-two years, one question, and no real answer
The premise, for anyone who came to this late: in the spring of 1964 Granada’s World in Action strand took 14 seven-year-olds from different corners of England – a pre-prep school in Kensington, a children’s home, a farm in the Yorkshire Dales, the East End – and asked them about their lives. The programme borrowed the old Jesuit line about giving me the child until he’s seven and I’ll show you the man. Then it came back at 14. And 21. And every seven years after that, with Apted, a researcher on the original, directing every instalment from 7 Plus Seven in 1970 to 63 Up in 2019.
He died in January 2021, aged 79. Kapadia, who won an Oscar for Amy and made Senna, took the last one on.
What 70 Up finally admits, and what Louis Chilton put his finger on in the Independent this week, is that as a social experiment it never really worked. Fourteen people isn’t a sample. Ten of them were boys. Almost all were white. The hypothesis – that class fixes your future before you’ve lost your milk teeth – was built into the casting before anyone had shot a frame. Andrew went to Charterhouse and Cambridge and became a partner at Linklaters, exactly as he’d predicted aged seven, so the theory looked sound. Neil, who wanted to be an astronaut and had the most confident grin of the lot, spent chunks of his twenties homeless and has lived with depression ever since, so the theory fell apart.
Life turned out messier than a Granada producer’s pitch. Sixty years on, that’s the only conclusion worth drawing.
The right of reply Michael Apted never gave them
This is the section that makes the film. Kapadia isn’t heard asking a single question. There’s no narrator nudging you towards a feeling. He cuts between the decades and then simply lets people talk about how it felt to be a character in someone else’s story for their entire adult life.
John Brisby, the boy who told the cameras at seven which newspapers he read and grew up to be a barrister, says he felt cast as the bogeyman for a class system he doesn’t believe exists any more. At 35 he’d compared the series to a pill of poison injected every seven years. In 70 Up he goes further and says, quite calmly, “I never liked Michael.” The calm is what makes it sting.
Jackie Bassett is still cross about the question Apted put to her at 21 – whether she’d met enough men before marrying at 19 – and points out he never asked the boys anything like it. Suzy sat out 63 Up because she felt picked on. Charles Furneaux, who walked away after 21 Up and went on to commission documentaries at Channel 4, still won’t appear on camera; he narrates over his own photographs instead, which is a very Channel 4 way of taking back control. Neil, in his cluttered house in France, told the Guardian that viewers never saw the real him and that there’s a version of him Apted never found. He isn’t going to watch this one either. He doesn’t own a television.
And then there’s Tony.
Tony Walker, the Bethnal Green kid who wanted to be a jockey, became a cabbie, did a bit of acting (The Bill, EastEnders, a stint standing in for Christian Bale on Empire of the Sun) and now lives in a caravan in Epping Forest, adored Apted. Calls him a diamond. Told the Observer the man was like a dad to him. Kapadia gives Tony’s version exactly the same weight as John’s, and that’s the whole point. Apted was a brilliant film-maker and a manipulative one, and both things are true depending on which chair you were sat in.
So is 70 Up just a clip show?
The complaints started before the credits had finished. TV Guide rounded up the reaction on X on Wednesday and it was blunt: too much old footage, not enough of the last seven years, one viewer dismissing it as a “Greatest Hits package”, another reckoning there wasn’t much of the 70 in it. The Independent said the same thing in politer language – that it has the feel of a clip show and ends up feeling slightly inessential.
I half agree. If you’ve recently binged the earlier films, and my brother-in-law did exactly that over August, you’ll spend the first 40 minutes waiting for something you haven’t seen. The new material per person really is thin. A few minutes each, sometimes less.
But I’ll go further than half, and I’ll stand by it: the archive is the programme. 70 Up isn’t a documentary about a group of pensioners; it’s the final reel of a 62-year film, and the only place the full arc has ever been shown in one sitting is here. Watching Neil at seven, then at 21 in a London squat, then at 28 wandering the Highlands, then at 42 as a Lib Dem councillor in Hackney, then at 70 saying he’s as happy as his life allows – all inside six minutes – does something no amount of fresh footage of him pottering round a French kitchen could. The repetition isn’t padding. It’s the argument. It’s a very different kind of archive job from the Oasis documentary we reviewed last week, which used old footage to make you feel young; this uses it to make you feel old, and means it kindly.
Where the critics are right is the balance. Episode one should have been 60 minutes of now and 30 of then, not the other way round. We’ll see whether part two corrects it.
Nick’s last interview, and the quieter lives that stay with you
Nick Hitchon grew up on a farm in the Dales, went to Oxford, became a nuclear physicist in Wisconsin and died of throat cancer in 2023. He insisted on being filmed for 70 Up before he went, and by the participants’ own account finished the interview three days before he died.
It’s roughly ten minutes of a man talking lucidly about his own ending, and it’s the best television ITV has broadcast this year. No music swells. Nobody weeps to camera. He just talks about what he’s learnt, and then he’s gone, and the next cut is to him at seven, refusing to answer questions about girls. You won’t be all right after it. The Independent called it the most poignant part of the film and, for once, poignant is the right word rather than the lazy one.
Lynn Johnson, the East End librarian who died in 2013 at 57, gets her moment too, mostly through Jackie and Sue, who grew up with her. Sue, who spent most of the last seven years caring for her parents, says something about their generation being the ones dealing with care systems now, and it lands harder than it should because you’ve just watched her be nine and cheeky about boys.
Every review will lead on John and Neil, because conflict and tragedy cut better. But the people I kept thinking about on Wednesday morning were the ones the series never quite knew what to do with.
Bruce, who at seven announced that we should give most of our money to the poor, went on to teach maths to immigrant kids in the East End and then in Bangladesh, and is now retired in Berwick-upon-Tweed, singing in a choir and volunteering with the RNLI. He’s moved from the Church of England to the Quakers. He says the crew turning up every seven years felt like old friends dropping by, and you believe him, because he’s the only participant who seems to have got through the whole thing without a grudge.
Peter walked out after 28 Up, when a few remarks about Margaret Thatcher got him monstered by the tabloids in what we’d now call a pile-on, and stayed away for 28 years. He came back at 56 on one condition: his folk band got a mention. The Good Intentions landed a record deal off the back of it. That’s the Up series in miniature – a programme that could wreck a young teacher’s life and then, three decades later, quietly hand him a second career.
Sue, who spent 20 years running the law admin at Queen Mary University, says she sometimes feels a bit lost now the caring has stopped. It’s one line. It might be the most relatable line in the whole 90 minutes.
What 70 Up says about class in Britain now
John’s claim that we live in a classless society is the most revealing line in the film, and not in the way he intends. Kapadia doesn’t argue with him. He doesn’t need to. He simply cuts to Symon, the boy from the children’s home who never knew his Nigerian father, now a foster carer who’s taken in more than 120 children with his wife, and to Paul, the other children’s-home boy, who emigrated to Melbourne and has spent his life building the family he never had. Then back to Andrew’s houses in Wimbledon and West Sussex. Nobody says the word class. Nobody has to.
That’s the trick Apted pulled for six decades and Kapadia inherits: the series never proved anything, but it showed everything. And what it shows in 2026 is a country where the toffs stayed toffs, the East End girls ended up on the Norfolk coast and in Essex, reasonably content, the children’s-home boys built the biggest families of all, and the one middle-class boy with every advantage fell through every net there was. If a sociology department produced that as a finding it’d be laughed out of the room. As television, it’s the truest thing about Britain on any channel. The Irish Times reviewer Ed Power landed on the phrase “morbidly comforting” for the film’s message that nobody, from any background, has life worked out. That’s about right.
It’s also a rebuke to the reality formats that borrowed its clothes. We reviewed ITV’s Big Brother relaunch earlier this week and, whatever its merits, it will never make you feel this. Big Brother gives you 54 nights. The Up series gave you 62 years and asked for nothing in return except that you keep turning up every seven of them. In a year when British drama struggles to get past six episodes and the industry’s big argument has been whether audiences still have the patience for weekly releases, here’s a programme that made a nation wait 2,555 days between instalments and still turned up.
The two things 70 Up gets wrong
The first is the balance already mentioned. The second is smaller but nagging: the absence of Apted’s voice from the new interviews makes the old interviews feel like a different programme. For 56 years you heard him off-camera – prodding, sometimes needling, occasionally being told off. Now there’s silence where the questions used to be. Kapadia’s restraint is the right decision on paper, and I’ve argued above that it’s what lets the subjects speak. But something has gone with him, a rapport built over a lifetime, and the new footage is inevitably a touch more formal because of it. Suzy, back after skipping 63, seems to be talking to a producer she’s only just met. Because she is.
Neither flaw is fatal. A lesser film would have hidden both.
How to watch 70 Up, and the two companion films
Episode one is on ITVX now. Episode two, the actual finale, goes out at 9pm on Tuesday 22 September on ITV1 and ITVX.
ITV has also made two half-hour companion pieces. 70 Up: The Victorians airs at 7.30pm on Tuesday 22 September, directly before the finale, and uses archive interviews MultiStory Media’s team unearthed with people born in the Victorian era who were turning 70 around the time the first film was made – the same age Tony and Jackie are now, in a wholly different country. 7 Up: The Story follows at 7.30pm on Wednesday 23 September and goes back to how the 1964 original was put together. If you only have time for one extra, make it The Victorians; two sets of 70-year-olds separated by a century is exactly the kind of thing the series was always quietly about. And if the archive gives you the itch to go back to the very start, the earlier films are worth tracking down and are a better use of a wet weekend than most of the box sets we rounded up last month.
All of it’s free. No subscription, no premium tier, no banner warning you the title leaves in 30 days. For a programme that started on a regional ITV franchise in 1964, ending as a free-to-air, on-demand box set is about the right kind of full circle.
The question that hangs over the last five minutes of episode one, and presumably the whole of episode two, is whether anyone will ever do this again. Andrew says he doesn’t know of anything else that’s followed people for 63 years. Jackie and Sue reckon it wouldn’t get commissioned now, and they’re probably right: no broadcaster would sign a 63-year contract, no parent would sign a seven-year-old up to it, and no participant would put up with what Apted put them through. Which leaves an odd feeling as the end credits approach next Tuesday. We’re not just saying goodbye to Tony and Neil and Jackie. We’re watching the end of the only long-term promise British television ever kept.
So, one for you: when part two ends next week, will you feel you’ve said goodbye to fourteen people you knew, or to a version of them a director chose for you – and does the difference matter?
