7-Up (The Michael Apted documentary series)

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.