What ITV’s 7 Up documentary series tells us about attitudes towards senior citizens - David Behrens
ITV was one of Britain’s better ideas, despite Churchill’s ill-concealed contempt. Without it we would never have had The Sweeney, Coronation Street or Brideshead Revisited. We’ll gloss over The Jeremy Kyle Show.
We would also have been denied this week’s sequel to Seven Up, the documentary conceived in 1964 as a single edition of World in Action which went on to chronicle the lives of 14 subjects from primary school to retirement. It is an achievement unparalleled in television history.
The idea was to discover whether someone’s future is fated by the time they are seven by virtue of their class. Tim Hewat, the producer who ran Granada’s current affairs department, had in mind the old Jesuit saying: ‘Give me a child until he is seven, and I will show you the man.’
The answer was a foregone conclusion, of course: the class system was a preordained slope which nearly 20 years of the postwar welfare state had failed to level. It was no coincidence that in that election year of 1964, 13 years of patrician Tory rule came to an end.
Sixty-two years later, Seven Up is itself ending. Those seven year-olds are now 70 and we have all seen how their lives played out. Those who were born into privilege, who spoke while still in short trousers of going up to Cambridge, have by and large enjoyed successful professional careers. Those from state schools or charity homes made the best of it in an emerging competitive world. Only a few deviated from the path society had laid out for them.
If we learned anything about class, it was that those who sounded at seven as if they were choking on their silver spoons have had to smooth the edges off their cut-glass elocution because they realise they are the outliers now.
But what of the programme’s other central theme, of growing old? ITV is ending the series because its subjects are now 70 and their life journeys are presumed to be over. Only someone under 50 could have taken that decision.
And while it is understandable on one level – footage of people going to the garden centre and queueing for their Covid jabs is probably not going to make ideal viewing – it is also a metaphor for a society in which retired people are institutionally excluded from the national conversation. You’re 70 now: we’re not interested in you any more. That’s what they’re saying to us.
In 1964, when the average male life expectancy was 68, that would have made sense but today’s 70-year-olds may still have some of their best years ahead of them. I’m the same age as those in the programme so I’m entitled to hope so.
But no government has taken that view. Growing old in Britain is a political ‘problem’, a football to be kicked into the long grass, a national liability. The fall of the assisted dying Bill in the Commons last week in favour of theoretical social care reform that is never going to happen was another example of exactly that.
Perhaps you saw the first half of what they’re now calling 70 Up last Tuesday; did any of the participants seem old to you? Age is relative, of course, but I think even younger viewers will have seen them in the same light as their own grandparents, as essential components of a family unit who give life to those around them. In Japan they revere people like that. There is a paid public celebration each year where children prepare tokens of appreciation to senior citizens.
The subjects of Seven Up have given us a unique perspective on the process of growing up and eventually old. The milestones in our own lives, careers, marriages and divorces, are threaded through theirs. Yet care homes are not to be a shared experience. They remain hidden away on the quiet margins of society.
We do see one poignant valediction. Nick Hitchon was the Yorkshire farmer’s son who in 1964 squirmed in his single-room Dales primary school as they asked him if he had a girlfriend. “I don’t answer those kinds of questions,” he said in flat West Riding tones that placed him at the opposite end of the social spectrum from the public schoolboys on their way to Cambridge.
Yet Nick reached beyond what was written in the stars. He went to grammar school and then Oxford, became a nuclear scientist and moved to America.
For him the programme really was a whole-life experience. He had cancer and knew he wouldn’t make it to 70 so he got them to film his contribution to the final episodes three years ago, a few days before he died. It wasn’t class after all that was the great leveller.
Meanwhile his peers are proving that 70 is not just an age for retrospection at the end of a journey but the threshold of a quieter, deeper wisdom. It is ITV’s loss and society’s failure in choosing to look away.