A reminder that reality TV can be a noble enterprise
For true TV lovers, there are few phrases likelier to raise hackles and sink hearts than “reality television”. Even before the full, if unsurprising horror of The Jeremy Kyle Show was revealed, those two innocuous-sounding words had long come to signify a highly constructed, deeply manipulative brand of programme-making that reduces its participants’ lives to little more than clickbait, with gleeful outrage as the desired outcome.
Fortunately, this week sees the
return of a series which serves as a vivid reminder that reality television needn’t be this way – but can instead be a kindly, thoughtful, even noble enterprise. Odder still, it can provide genuine insights into reality.
The Up series – which, rather scarily, has now reached 63 Up – famously began as a World in Action documentary in 1964 about a carefully mixed bunch of British seven-yearolds. Back then, its political agenda wasn’t hard to spot. While the posh kids explained exactly which Oxbridge college they intended to go to, Paul – a boy from a children’s home – asked, “What’s a university?” Since then, with director Michael Apted revisiting the group every seven years, the question of class has never entirely gone away: most of those posh kids achieved their Oxbridge expectations and Tony the East-End cabbie still regards the world as “them and us”. But the programme has also broadened into nothing less than a full-scale meditation on what makes for a life well lived.
Better still, it’s done this with a complete (and these days vanishingly rare) lack of self-hype. Up has received any number of accolades – from being named the best documentary ever in a 2005 film-makers’ poll to being parodied on The Simpsons. Yet, however lauded it’s become, Apted’s head has never been turned. He’s simply gone about his business of quietly asking the participants about their lives, always concentrating on them as individuals and leaving us to ponder the wider issues for ourselves.
Some of these, of course, are to do with social history. In this week’s programmes, several interviewees are worried that their children will be the first generation for whom life will be harder than for their parents. Tony has lost a third of his income to Uber, with his ability to memorise every street in London unforeseeably outsourced to smartphones.
There’s also the question that the series posed itself right from the start: were the Jesuits right to claim “Give me a child until he’s seven and I will give you the man”? And by now, I’d suggest, we have our answer – a firm “sometimes”. Tony, his fellow East-Ender Sue and Paul are easily recognisable from their seven-year-old selves (fundamentally irreverent, cheerful and anxious, respectively). Nick, however, has gone from Yorkshire farmer’s son to professor of physics in America; Neil, who started out as a lively, enthusiastic schoolboy, went through periods of homelessness and despair before becoming a still-fretful Lib Dem councillor.
By now, too, we’re getting a real sense of the arc of a life. At 63, the participants are duly beginning to suffer from various ailments – and one, the children’s librarian Lynn, died in 2013. (In the second episode, Apted pays her a characteristically understated but very moving tribute.) Many have lost parents since we last saw them, often after a long period of deterioration that, as one of them puts it, “makes you realise what’s in store for you”. None the less, these programmes are by no means melancholy affairs. In late middle age, it seems, most people are touchingly accepting of how things have turned out, and largely free of regret. For some, including the high-flying lawyer Andrew and the less high-flying teacher Bruce, the death of ambition as their careers come to an end is clearly something of a relief.
Meanwhile, the bad news for thrusting young types everywhere is that it looks as if the keys to happiness are as unflashy but effective as the programme itself: a loving partner, spending time with your children, spoiling your grandchildren. “I wasn’t content with a quiet, domesticated life,” reflects Neil towards the end of the final episode – and after seeing everybody else, you can’t help wishing for his sake that he had been.
But perhaps the single most striking aspect of these programmes is also the most heartening. This doesn’t seem to be a particularly fashionable view at the moment (certainly judging from Twitter) but, like its predecessors,
63 Up strongly suggests that most people are essentially pretty nice.