7 Up gave me the best days of my life – but I’m getting too old for it
After 56 years, Michael Apted’s celebrated series returns as 63 Up, but it may be the last instalment
FOR 56 years we have followed their lives, from bright-eyed schooldays to the joys and disappointments of middle age.
But this instalment of the landmark Up series may well be the last, as the participants admit that time has finally caught up with them.
Michael Apted’s celebrated ITV documentary, which began in 1964, returns next week as 63 Up.
Three of the cast – Sue Davis, Bruce Balden and Tony Walker – spoke to Radio Times about the series. Asked if they would appear in a 70 Up, Walker said: “‘Seven to 70’ has got a good ring. [But] you have to look at Michael, who’s now 77.”
He would like to do another series “providing the same crew are still here. We’re not getting any younger though”.
Davis said: “Personally, I am in a good place but things are going to get worse. You’re going to get sicker and older. Both my parents are with me so I’m thinking, ‘Another seven years, who knows? Am I going to be here, are they going to be here?’ There’s an element that thinks this would be a good time to finish.”
Davis first featured in 7 Up as an East End schoolgirl alongside her friends Lynn Johnson and Jackie Bassett. Johnson died in 2013. All of the other cast members are still alive, although some have dropped out of the project as years have gone by. Walker was one of the most memorable, briefly fulfilling his schoolboy desire to be a jockey before working as a London cabbie.
He now looks back at filming 7 Up as “some of the best days of my life”.
He said: “I remember we went to the playground and had some lemonade and Jackie was dancing. And me beating up the posh kids.”
Balden was one of the “posh kids”, first encountered as a boarder who wanted to be a missionary in Africa. He went on to graduate from Oxford University, taught in Bangladesh and is now teaching at a private school in St Albans.
The programme is based on the maxim: give me a child until he is seven and I will show you the man.
Asked if that had proved true, Balden said: “There’s something from the seven-year-old in all of us, you can see that. It certainly was a polemic about class to begin with, but it has become much more human than that with the stories.”
One of the contributors, Nick Hitchon, has been diagnosed with cancer. Apted said it was “extremely painful” to see one of the group so seriously ill.
He explained: “We do love them all. It’s a very close family, and you don’t want to hurt people, but we all know we’ve got a job to do. And it’s important. No one has ever done this before and no one will ever do it again. We have a very privileged position, so we have to get the best out of it, even if some of it’s horrible and painful.”
Davis, a university administrator, said the most surprising thing about being part of the series was the reaction she received in the US. She said: “In America I went with Michael to a film festival and the Americans absolutely love this programme. People were hugging me in the street. They said they had been watching me since I was seven years old.”
Walker added: “A woman got in touch with me from Hull and she said when I was seven she was pregnant and she had a baby boy and named it Tony. And Tony had a son called Tony.
“And she still phones me and sends me a Christmas card.”
‘We do love them all. It’s a very close family, and you don’t want to hurt people, but we’ve got a job to do’