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We've followed their lives for six decades; now the stars of 7 Up are bowing out
- jrg123 14d agohttps://archive.ph/YvfUV https://archive.ph/YvfUV
- glimshe 14d agoA genuinely interesting article. I'd like to know more about how their lives changed throughout the years... ...although there is no reason to want to know that. They are regular people like the neighbor and the mailmen. Gosh, the things TV make us want to do!
- jhbadger 14d agoThe Up series is genuinely interesting though and previous installments directed by the late Michael Apted were critically acclaimed. The fact that these people are normal British people (from various socioeconomic classes) is the point -- you can look at them at different ages and see how the intersection of personality, ability, and class affected their development.
- Aeolun 14d agoBut they all went to the same elementary school!
- bentley 14d agoNo, they came from a range of schools. In fact, the premise of the first documentary, before it became a series, was that where children end up in life can be predicted from the social class they started in. But the series outgrew that simplistic idea very quickly.
- fortran77 14d ago[flagged]
- nikanj 14d agoI learned of the 7 Up from the case of Jason Arday, an unexpexted silver lining in an otherwise dismal affair
- pelagicAustral 14d agoWhats the link?
- fhdkweig 14d agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jason_Arday#Other_allegations https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jason_Arday#Other_allegations He was a compulsive liar (judging from the rest of the wikipedia page), and one of the lies was that he was one of the kids interviewed. It was a lie that was easily disproven because we all can watch those videos. It is also explained in the link fortran77 posted that got flagged to death.
- pelagicAustral 13d agoahhh Got you. OK. Man, lying about something that easy to disprove is absolutely insane.
- lordnacho 14d agoThis is what I thought "Reality TV" should have been. Genuinely interesting content about real people in the real world. Somehow they managed to just create soap opera with bad actors instead.
- dylan604 14d ago"Reality TV" as it is now was born from a writer's strike. Producers couldn't outright give the people scripts and written lines, but they could stand off camera and feed them lines off the cuff in the style of leading questions. If anyone thinks these shows are not intentionally pushed in the directions the producers want, then they just are not paying attention. Which is precisely what these producers want
- vasco 14d agoI know many people who watch, I watch myself, and we all know it's semi scripted and that the overall arcs are decided in advance. The really interesting thing about reality tv is once you realise that this is happening, the "Reality" part really comes back into play even stronger because you can see how people react in such situations (the situation being them being part of a scripted reality tv show while wanting to increase their social media following etc). These days there's also the whole component of social media posts and real life events between the seasons that sometimes are more juicy than the show itself, but only get exposed because of the show. It's just that most people who don't watch, or like to feel smarter than those who watch, think that you just sit there and suspend all belief instead of seeing it for what it is and acknowledging it's pretty interesting.
- lotsofpulp 14d agoI don’t see how that differs from any other fiction. Either the whole thing is non fiction, or it’s fictional. I would even go so far as to label only videos of an event itself, like security recordings, to be non fiction as re-enactments and whatnot can have a lot of extra information that was not there in real life.
- the_interloper 14d agoNick Hitchon was a professor of mine in college. He seemed like a genuinely very nice guy and took the time to learn everyone's name, despite how large the classes were.
- loevborg 14d ago7up is truly one of the most astonishing and ambitious pieces of television ever made. When I found it, I couldn't stop watching it and I learned a ton from it. Highly recommended!
- bentley 14d agoIts reach exceeds its grasp, but what a concept to reach for. Truly distilling seven years of a life into a single couple‐hour documentary is obviously impossible, let alone seven years of fourteen lives, yet in trying it gets partway there, and later episodes get even more interesting by acknowledging the limitations. A phenomenal series.
- MrSkelter 13d agoI don’t think it’s trying to distill life in the way you say. It’s the opposite. It’s impossibly thin slices of lives, the length of a conversation at a bus stop, which accrete meaning over the episodes. You are constantly reminded of what you only know because of earlier episodes, and how much goes unsaid. It’s something only empathy can make sense of and it challenges the viewer to empathize across time and culture. The class resonances mean it’s a different experience when watched as a British person too.
- vr46 14d agoI have followed the Up Series for decades, although fewer than six, and I am truly sorrowful at its end. When I was young they felt so far away from me and as I've gotten older I felt as though I have been catching up.
- ProllyInfamous 13d ago>as I've gotten older: ---- >>We get wise too late, >>and old too soon. >>–Danish proverb ---- Everybody I've ever recommended the "7 Up" series to has thanked me. I rewatch them all, every few years – my first viewing was right before my own 21st birthday (decades ago).
- unpopularopp 14d ago> Apted acknowledged flaws with the show, saying it was a "horrible error" to have only four women in a cast of 14 when making the original selection I am more surprised they could only found 14 white kids even in 1964! A show like this would be very different today.
- Mountain_Skies 14d agoWhy is that surprising? In 1961, the UK was 98.5% British White. By 1971, it was still 97% British White. That fourteen people of that time period would be British White isn't unlikely.
- xp84 14d agoIt's always funny to watch people project today's dogma onto a time period when it was wildly inapplicable. "Where's the diversity!?!?!!"
- gnfargbl 14d agoOne of the participants, Symon, is mixed-race.