It was a groundbreaking documentary series that became a TV institution as it followed the lives of 14 Britons of vastly different backgrounds from the age of seven through nearly six decades.
Made at seven-year intervals, each instalment of the award-winning Up series, which started with Seven Up! in 1964, charted the children’s journey deep into adulthood, and dramatised how their lives were shaped and limited by social background and class.
At the turn of the century, the producers had a new idea – to make a millennial version of the programme pioneered by the director Michael Apted. The result is a panorama of the evolution of modern Britain.
As 28 Up New Generation, the latest chapter, returns to the BBC on Wednesday, what is especially striking is how the gap between millennials and their baby boomer forebears is now as great as the social gap between the participants themselves.
“You can definitely see huge demographic changes since the original films,” said the new series’ director, Julian Farino.
“Not many of our contributors have their own homes, very few are married, and only one has children. While the original series had a strong sense of the nuclear family, a large percentage of our children have parents that separated, and that’s not been a negative or critical thing.”
Farino, who won a Bafta for his film Marvellous and was nominated for the Emmys for hit show Entourage, took the reins from Apted, director of the original films who died earlier this year.
“Apted’s series was the thing that most made me want to be in this business, I thought it was the greatest thing that had ever been on television,” he said.
In 1999 Farino and producer Melanie Archer auditioned 2,000 children from all over Britain to find their cast members. They went through schools, youth clubs and youth groups, hoping to find a cross-section of class, race and geography. “We had no agenda, mostly we chose the participants by sheer instinct,” he said.
The premise of Apted’s original film was taken from the Jesuit motto: “Give me a child until he is seven and I will give you the man.” Farino said he similarly wanted to shine a spotlight on “the magic of the ordinary” – normal folk made extraordinary by the nature of their universality. “Every life has its dramas, its highs and lows,” he said.
“At the beginning Michael oversaw the project, and we became good friends over the years. He said to me this will become a much more important and significant part of your life than you can ever realise. He was completely right. You become part parent, guardian, friend and everything else to the participants over the years. It’s a bizarrely close relationship.”
The struggles of today’s cast members are simultaneously unique and strikingly familiar. They include Sanchez, from Leeds, who had to give up his career as a footballer because of serious injury; Gemma, from Bolton, who is trying to come to terms with her disability; and Talan, from Cornwall, who is working to overcome his battle with depression.
Orala, another participant, grew up in a Nigerian family in Hackney, east London, and moved to Kettering in Northamptonshire so she could afford to buy her own home. She said comparing her life to a 28-year-old from 50 years ago was like “comparing life to what it was like pre-electricity”.
“The actual state of existence is so different,” she said. “Things have become so inaccessible. Before, if you just worked hard enough, you could maintain a certain standard of living. But now it’s completely out of reach. The framework that existed about what life should look like, what we should aim for, just doesn’t fit any more. Twenty-eight-year-olds have to redefine what adulting looks like.”
And, she said, the conversations people are having today are different too: “No one was talking about mental health 50 years ago,” (although mental health problems were tracked among the original participants in Seven Up).
“Gender roles are different. Technology has had such a massive impact, the idea of falling in line with the whole idea of marriage and kids just because that’s what’s expected of you sounds laughable.”
Apted’s 28 Up was chosen for Roger Ebert’s list of the 10 greatest films of all time. Thirty years later, Farino’s version of the fourth phase of his subjects’ lives is being released, and it is a particularly special chapter because the contributors are finally settling into their own skin.
“At seven there was an innocence, at 14 they were faced with the trials of adolescence. At 21 there was an unsettled quality, but 28 is when they’re really becoming themselves. They’re no longer just parts of their family,” he said.
For Farino each film was like making a period piece. “We found that in modern Britain people feel less defined by class or status or location,” he said. “It’s a melting pot.”
Episode one of 28 Up: Millenium Generation is on BBC One on Wednesday at 9pm
