7 Up

To some of you I may have mentioned our fascination with the British documentary series 7 Up. I highly recommend it to anybody, but to expectant parents, it really is amazing. In short, a British film crew began this project with the thesis, by the age of 7, you are already who you will be for the rest of your life. They interviewed 14 children from different backgrounds, rich, poor, public school and private. Then, every seven years, the same team finds these kids and interviews them again. You get to watch the same person age in fast forward.


We watched “28 Up” last night so bear with me for this brief rant.

Part of the fun is just the physical nature of aging. The bad haircuts, the acne and facial hair, the fashion sense, etc. Something about seeing the same face age over time that Hollywood could never replicate honestly. It’s been amazing to see how people age, and what doesn’t change.

The series has been obviously set up with certain expectations, and the questions tend to pursue the main thesis. Kids from money have more opportunities than poor kids, and will “turn out better”. It’s one of the first things that all of them resist at one point or another. Nobody wants to represent a whole swath of the population, and you can’t draw too sharp of a generalization once you get to really know everybody. There are no Rich kids, there’s just John, Andrew, and Philip. Just as there are no poor kids, just Simon and Paul.

We just finished watching 28 Up, which has it’s own guilty pleasure, in that our subjects are now just about to reach our age. They’re having kids and getting married now. Some have found jobs, some became homeless. Others have followed the set path we knew they would, and others have rebelled against theirs.

The irony is, they can talk forever about what it’s been like growing up, but they’ll never have the perspective we get. Every one of them talks about ambitions, failures, regrets and fortune, but there’s something in the comparison that is more than the sum of all parts. It certainly helps that they are all painfully, sometimes embarrassingly honest. But watching 14 stories unfold it doesn’t really matter how much money they make, what jobs they get, or how many kids they have. It’s dangerously easy to focus on how human they become over time, and we’re not even half way thorough yet.

This December we get the latest update. The kids are now all 56. I suppose after that we’ll have to wait another 7 years for the next installment. But if you ever wanted to see what it would be like to watch your child grow, and get a freakishly real look at the future, put on a big pot of coffee and start watching this series. Good stuff.