Posted November 29, 2006Time's Up!
by licensed television critic Farrell ChildeBack in 1999 we published a review of 42 Up, which was then the latest in distinguished director and producer Michael Apted's Seven Up series of television documentaries. This series began in 1964, supposedly as a test of the contention that character is formed by the age of 7. A group of seven-year-old English children was interviewed, and every seven years since they've been interviewed again, filmed in their daily lives, and another documentary produced. 42 Up showed the coverage of the 42-year-olds.
At the time rumour had it that 42 Up would be the last instalment in the series. However, last year Mr. Apted released 49 Up, which has now started appearing on the Canadian airwaves, and he is talking about producing a 56 Up. Therefore, we at NEW IMPROVED HEAD have decided that it is our duty to give YOU, our readers, fair warning of what you’re going to run into if you decide to set aside the two hours and more required to watch this latest instalment (three hours with commercials).
In 1999 we noted that 42 Up showed little interest in its ostensible purpose of investigating the formation of character. The current instalment shows no interest whatever in this purpose. This lack of interest may be due to Mr. Apted’s belated realization, revealed in a recent interview, that he made a mistake in selecting an unrepresentatively high proportion of rich and poor children for his comparisons, since over the years the most important social changes in Britain have taken place in the middle classes.
Apparently Mr. Apted was chiefly interested in the effects of social class on character, so we can but agree – leaving out the classes that most children belonged to was an error. The error may, it seems, have been forced on Mr. Apted by the television network which commissioned the original documentary (he of course had not then attained the eminence he now enjoys), but it still is fatal to the entire project.
One must seriously question, though, whether the ostensible purpose of these documentaries was ever their real purpose. The chief justification for this question is Mr. Apted’s failure to cite the results of any real research about child development. A more plausible explanation for the series is that Mr. Apted decided to continue filming because he liked his subjects and wanted to find out what happened to them.
Whatever the truth is, the idea that the documentaries constitute research has been abandoned, and it seems NIH was right back in 1999 to say that the series had degenerated into soap opera,. In 49 Up one of the subjects (John) compares it to so-called reality television, but Mr. Apted’s presentation of his subjects’ lives as linear narratives makes the films more like Coronation Street (episodes of which, strange to say, Mr. Apted has directed). We tune in every seven years to see if Tony has managed to survive without getting into trouble (yes), if Bruce has finally got married (yes), or if something good has finally happened to Neil (sort of).
But about character we learn nothing. The subjects of the documentary all turned out to be decent, honest folk, which is the chance you run when your “research” has a sample size of 14. Sitting through a couple of hours of documentary every seven years to find out they’re still decent, honest folk , though, is a waste of our time, and producing those couple of hours certainly seems to be a greater waste of Mr. Apted’s.
Time's Up! © John FitzGerald, 2006
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