7 Up TV Series Re-View Part 3 21 Up

Bringing the cast together

This time, the film starts with the 14 children having been brought together as a whole group to watch the first two shows of the series in a small cinema. I can only imagine how mortifying it must have been for them to see their younger selves as (sometimes) precocious children and (mostly) moody mid teens! Don’t forget, documentaries seldom if ever got repeated so it would have been almost certainly the first time they had seen either documentary since its release. I would have hated it but like all the children, at this point, I would have felt something of a responsibility to keep going. After the showings they are shown having drinks and food together leading to a very interesting scene between would be East End wide boy, Tony, and the outwardly very privileged John. Tony, very perceptively muses on the ability of the documentary makers to choose the scenes they want to show in order to create characters for the participants. He talks about John being made to look like the good one and Tony made to look like the bad lad. John smiles and points out that he thinks it may well be the other way round to the audience! So, how were the 21 year olds portrayed and how did they react to the way their younger selves were shown?

21 Up

For me, the star of the show this time round was Tony. He has grown from a potential tearaway at 7 to a hard working 21 year old who has a fairly matter of fact attitude to the cards life deals him and invariably makes the most of his hand. An apprentice jockey at 14, he raced three times professionally for Tom Gosling’s stable. When asked by Michael Apted what happened he simply says that he obviously wasn’t good enough! At 14 he was asked what he would do if horse racing didn’t work out and he says he would become a taxi driver. At 21 he is on his moped getting the map of London fixed in his head for the famously tough test of black cab drivers, ‘The Knowledge’. He is a bookie’s runner at Walthamstow dog track and quite clearly fancies himself as a lady’s man. He talks about the three Fs which I will leave to your imagination and bemoans the fact that he couldn’t forget his current girlfriend! The overall impression you are left with is someone who is extremely adaptable and who will find a way to succeed whatever happens. He is certainly focused on whatever is next rather than what is past, a very useful skill to have.

John, who Tony was talking to in that opening scene is much more forthright about the way he and his class are viewed than either Andrew or Charles who perhaps feel the same way. He points out that just because they ended up going to the schools they predicted at 7 and, in two cases, the university courses they predicted, it wasn’t the fait accompli that it was perhaps portrayed as in the programme. The snapshots are simply that and don’t show the hours of study and exam preparation. While his point that they have to work hard is well made, he is still portrayed as very much a product of privilege, with a scene showing him as a ‘beater’ for hare coursing, which is now illegal, and a voiceover of him bemoaning the fact that opponents know nothing about it. He and Andrew are in their final years studying law at this point. Charles, meanwhile did not get into Oxbridge and was in his final year at Durham studying history. Although he still sounds very similar to John and Andrew, his long hair, casual clothing and casual demeanour indicate that he is now quite different from his two pre-prep school classmates.

The next trio are Jackie, Lynn and Sue, the three girls from the East End, two of whom went to comprehensive school and one who went to grammar. Lynn, the grammar school pupil, is married and working as a mobile school librarian by the time of 21 Up. She had thought of becoming a teacher but decided it was not for her, but she was clearly in her element as a librarian. Jackie also married at 19 and, amusingly, admits that there are times since the marriage when she has asked herself, ‘What have I done?’! Sue was not married at this point and worked in a bank, a job she was quite enjoying at the time. The three girls are apparently confident and still apparently a tight knit group despite the way that life has ushered them down different paths.

Nicholas, the boy who grew up on a Yorkshire Farm had lost his very strong regional accent, perhaps deliberately, and was at Oxford University studying physics. He seems to give a lie to the ‘show me the child at 7’ motto that set this documentary series on its path. He is no longer the shy, awkward child we saw at 7 or 14. Instead he is an outwardly, and seemingly inwardly, confident young man who knows where he wants to be and is enjoying Oxford enormously. When you saw him at 7, or actually 6 given that he was a year younger than the rest of the group, the young man in front of viewers now would be virtually impossible to picture.

Paul and Symon were two seven year olds we first met at a charity run boarding school. Symon stayed there until moving back in with his mother at 13 and Paul left at 8 when his family emigrated to Australia. Paul was flown back to the UK for the show and he and Paul are shown walking round their old school. Symon clearly sees it as a huge factor in his childhood but Paul remembers very little and is seemingly bored by the whole trip down memory lane. He has become a real Aussie in the intervening years with the accent and the lifestyle. He is a junior partner in a bricklaying firm and he has a settled relationship. Symon on the other hand is seemingly uncertain of where he wants to be in life and comes across as less confident and less focused. At that point, the era of £10 Poms, Australia truly was the land of opportunity and Paul has grabbed it with both hands. You wonder how different Symon’s life would have been if he had been given that opportunity.

Peter and Bruce are both at university at this point, the latter at Oxford studying Mathematics and taking his tutor through very complicated mathematical proofs that I couldn’t begin to follow! Bruce had been through a difficult time the previous year, when he signed up as secretary for four different societies and then had no time to do anything in any of his roles. Apparently he tried to avoid the rest of the students for 6 months as a result of the fallout! Peter doesn’t seem to want to be at university and has drifted through the course with little obvious enthusiasm. The two young men are still very much trying to find their way in the world.

Suzy, the star of Seven plus Seven saw her parents divorce at 14 and has since dropped out of university. Stress seems to have been an ever present theme of the intervening years and her brittleness is sad to see. She is travelling abroad on holidays seemingly to have something to do, but with the anchor of a strong family unit removed in many ways, she is drifting and cynical about the whole series and, indeed, pretty much anything else.

Finally, we have Neil, resentful of his own parents, another university drop out and squatting in a flat with a cat for company. He is quite matter of fact about squatting pointing out that otherwise this would be just one more empty flat with no purpose. It was quite interesting to see how squatting was so well organised and regulated at the time! Neil is clearly very unhappy and very directionless. Whether the documentary makers had an inkling that he would become such a central figure later on is open to conjecture, but you can’t help but see some foreshadowing here.

My reaction

This episode clearly shows that the adult versions of the children we already know are indeed shaped by their upbringing and experiences, but in ways that we can’t always predict. Seeing this series one instalment a week rather than one every seven years means you can make connections much more easily, but the danger is that you fall foul of the Latin phrase ‘Post Hoc Ergo Proctor Hoc’ which means ‘After it therefore because of it’. Are you looking for causal links that aren’t there? Perhaps. Did the viewers at the time do this? Almost certainly. It really gets into its stride here as a proper social and historical document and it is valuable far beyond that as an insight into lives you otherwise wouldn’t have any understanding of. 28 Up next and one of the most famous strands of the entire series. No spoilers though!