7-Up (The Michael Apted documentary series)

He was just a production assistant or w/e on the first one, it'd make sense for the team to do a final one without him.

Haven’t seen 63 Up yet but we watched all of the series one after the other earlier in 2020 and it was extremely disorienting to go through human lives that fast. Can’t say I would recommend it; I felt mildly seasick after they got to middle age.

I loved the series and having watched it but the watching itself brought its own issues apparently.

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/14/movies/michael-apted-up-series-future.html

Claire Lewis, who started as a researcher on “28 Up” and later became a lead producer, said that Apted had always been “very proprietorial” about the series. But she recalled that on the press tour for “63 Up,” as it became clear that the director was becoming more frail and forgetful, he told a Q. and A. audience, “I suppose she could do it,” gesturing to Lewis.

“I could carry it on,” Lewis said, adding that it would come down to the subjects’ assent and the health of the crew. The cameraman, George Jesse Turner, and sound engineer, Nick Steer, have been with the program since “21 Up,” from 1977; the editor, Kim Horton, joined for “28 Up.”

“None of us are spring chickens — we’re all geriatric, honestly,” Lewis said, citing her own age as “70-ish.” “We’re going to need an ambulance, if we ever did it again, to take us all around. I think we’ll just have to say we’ll wait and see.”

Asked if she would participate without Apted, Bassett began to cry. She agreed that Lewis, who’d long had the job of keeping in touch with the cast between shoots, was the logical successor. (Walker concurred and was more enthusiastic about continuing.)

“70 and 7 do have a good symmetry,” Bassett said. “It would definitely have to be the last one for everybody.”

Aw, ta.

I felt guilty hoping they would do 70, because I feel like nobody owes me that, but hearing that it sounds like maybe it will happen really warms me.

I absolutely understand if it ends now or at 70 but I do think it’s a shame. I remember hearing Apted being quite dismissive of the value of it going on too long, but I think our society is so bad at differentiating ages over 65. You could still easily live for 30 years, and I think those different phases of later life are definitely worth exploring, even if this can’t be the avenue for it.

28-up (millennium version) on bbc1 tonight

RIP Nick Hitchon
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/28/movies/nicholas-hitchon-seven-up-dead.html

What a pleasure it is to see him so vibrant and engaged in 21 Up, and the glints in his eye and barely contained sneers facing off with Apted in subsequent films. RIP.

i'd seen all the films individually but never in proximity to each other, until earlier this year i sat down and watched the whole series beginning to end over the course of a couple months. one of my takeaways was that Nick was the subject who i was most thankful kept participating. he's obviously not the only person to critique the project & the experience, and all of the subjects are important to the series, but imho it would have been a different & significantly diminished series if Nick had bowed out at 35.

Only saw some of them and not in a while, can somebody sum up what his critique is?

The obit gets into it a bit:

Over the years, Professor Hitchon expressed both admiration for what the series was accomplishing and discomfort with being a part of it and with the way it was edited.

“I’ve learnt that the stupider the thing I say, the more likely it is to get in,” he told The Independent of Britain in 2012, when “56 Up” was released. “You’re asked to discuss every intimate part of your life. You feel like you’re just a specimen pinned on the board. It’s totally dehumanizing.”

He also thought the filmmakers had a tendency to play up stereotypes of British society, something he said he felt even as a boy in the early installments, when crew members would chase sheep into the camera’s view while filming him.

“These people thought that I was all about sheep,” he told The Chronicle of Higher Education in 2005. “I’m quite fond of sheep, but I was more interested in other things.”

Any word on wether the series is going to continue?

xp yeah nothing drastically different from what many of the other subjects had to say, but Nick just had a way of crystallizing in a very clear & insightful way that got right to the heart of the issues. angry & annoyed at times but never letting it overtake a sort of good natured openness in spite of it all. he clearly seemed to think the series had value & was important and was able to separate that from his (totally valid) feelings of frustration & mistreatment.

Cow_Art, Apted has also passed and I'm pretty sure no one's planning to continue without him.

Yeah, I knew he had died. It just seems like such a shame to let it stop at this point.

Perhaps, but I think that despite the very valid complaints from participants being discussed here they did have a rapport with Apted that couldn't easily be replicated, just by virtue of having gone through this together if nothing else. I also find the idea of it continuing until every last participant is dead and buried super depressing, but that might be my own fear of mortality.

A cash prize for the last one standing

I do totally get that it would be hard to continue, but I also disagree with those who say the study has run its course. There's a huge difference between being 63 and, say, 84 and how people deal with old age would be of great interest.

Seconded, Alba, but like you say I don't know how they could.

We watched all the series a few years back in one burst, when they were on one of the streaming apps, and it was wonderful. My partner and I still say "I wanna be a jockey when I grow up", or recite that speech by one of the little kids about getting a girlfriend, along the forlorn lines of "but what if she wants to go out and you don't want to go out and...", seemingly inventing Madness's My Girl a decade or so early.

After Apted died, his longtime producer Claire Lewis suggested that she could continue the series, but was noncommittal.