The original 7-Up was broadcast in 1964 as a one-off World in Action special, featuring children who were selected from different backgrounds and social spheres to talk about their hopes and dreams for the future. As members of the generation who would be running the country by the year 2000, what did they think they would become? With the rigid class system of 1960s Britain, 7-Up set out to discover whether or not the children's lives were pre-determined by their background. The result is ground-breaking television - the very first example of a programme recording real people living real lives - and the follow-up films have won an array of awards...

7-Up was originally inspired by World in Action founder editor Tim Hewat's interest in the class structure in 1960's Britain and the Jesuit quote: "Give me the child until he is seven and I will show you the man." The original programme was only supposed to be a one off, but since then every seven years director Michael Apted has returned to interview the original group to see how they are getting on. The most recent programme was filmed in 2005, when the participants were 49. Over the past five decades, the series has documented the group as they have become adults and entered middle-age, dealing with everything life has thrown at them in between.

I have to admit to never having seen this series before. Of course, I'd heard about it, but I'd never actually caught one of the episodes. While I don't think that there's really any thing of social interest that can be learned from the show, it is compulsive viewing - and it's interesting, if a little scary, to see how all of the interviewees has grown over the course of the series.

Extras include Michael Apted at Granada (21 min, 55 sec interview with Apted about his career at Granada. Of course Apted himself has had an interesting career since he started working on the show - most notably as the director of the James Bond movie The World Is Not Enough, [1999]); It Was Only Ever Going to be One Film (13 min, 35 sec interview with Apted where he explains how the series was never designed to run for more than one show, and why the decision to produce more was taken); and audio commentary on 28 Up (The commentary is conducted with some of the key staff. This is broken down into segments for each interviewee of the series, although not everyone that appeared on the programme has an audio commentary attached to them).

Highlights of the interviews include the fact that the researcher had a bit of a nightmare tracking down some of the interviewees for 28 Up, especially Neil; since 28 Up the series has had a limited cinema run in Australia and America; and we get to hear the reasons why Peter dropped out of the series.

While I'm not entirely sure that this series actually achieves what it sets out to do - or for that matter what the purpose of the series hoped to investigate beyond the first episode - but, as a snap shot of different members of society across their life times, this is an interesting documentary.

Personally, I'll be looking forward to catching up with them all again in 2012.

10

Darren Rea