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56 Up (TV)
R2 - United Kingdom - Network Review written by and copyright: Paul Lewis (22nd November 2012). |
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The Show
 56 Up (2012)  Often cited as ‘the world’s longest-running documentary film’ (eg, see Mitchell, 2012 :153), the Up series began in 1964 with Seven Up! (Granada). The intent behind the series was to explore the lives of a group of British children from different social backgrounds, and ‘follow […] their lives into adulthood, with catch-ups every seven years’ (ibid.). Seven Up!’s producer, the Australian journalist Tim Hewat, later claimed that the series was intended to show the extent to which British society was (and is) still riddled by class prejudice and barriers: ‘The Poms […] didn’t believe that this class division still existed, so I set out to prove it’, he later claimed (Hewat, quoted in ibid.).
To some extent, the series is dominated by the personality of Michael Apted, its director and guiding voice: Apted narrates the series and interviews the participants. Watching this group of children progress into adulthood and, later, middle age has become a bittersweet endeavour: in The New Biographical Dictionary of Film, David Thomson has asserted that ‘I’m not sure how many more of the series I want to see: many lives, but English lives especially, gather sadness as they grow older, and Apted is stuck with the people he found at the outset’ (Thomson, 2010: np). However, Thomson acknowledges the series’ relevance, claiming that ‘the series was a great idea, and anyone hoping to understand England should watch the films. 28 Up [1985] is the best of the bunch probably because the people have energies and hopes still to burn’ (ibid.). Interestingly, 28 Up was selected for inclusion in the British Film Institute’s 2000 list of ‘The Hundred Greatest Television Programmes’, apparently the only ‘stand-alone documentary’ within the list (Lee-Wright, 2010: 219). However, this long-running series had humble beginnings: it was originally produced for ITV’s World in Action, ‘just another documentary finding the political in the personal, and was never intended to become the recurrent phenomenon it has’ (ibid.). Seven Up! was originally planned as ‘a classic one-off, to illustrate the extent to which class defined children’s aspirations and expectations, and referenced the Jesuit founder Francis Xavier’s line: “Give me a child until he is seven and I will give you the man”’ (ibid.). Peter Lee-Wright suggests that as the series has progressed, the subjects (fourteen to begin with, with three withdrawing in their adult years) have developed and ‘intimacy […] with Apted’s camera’ and the series has offered a ‘reflexivity […] over the canvas of a whole lifetime’ (ibid.).  The success of the series has led to imitations in America, Australia, Russia, Japan and South Africa. Lee-Wright suggests that the Up series has had a significant impact on ‘the documentary form’ (ibid.: 220). He cited Stella Bruzzi, who has suggested the series’ success lies in being ‘poised between certainty (surety of intention and motivation) and uncertainty (the unpredictability inevitable caused by the individual subjects)’ (Bruzzi, quoted in ibid.). Similarly, Dianna T Kenny (2012) has suggested that the series highlights the ‘opposing dichotomies’ in people’s lives: ‘The lives of the children are remarkable both for the continuities (e.g., the child interested in astronomy grows up to become a professor of physics) and discontinuities (e.g., a seemingly happy, well-adjusted child succumbs to chronic mental illness beginning in young adulthood)’ (19).
Each entry into the Up series – and 56 Up is no exception – mixes candid interviews with the subjects and observational footage of their lives. The lives of the participants broadly represent the lives of those from similar social backgrounds: the children were selected from a broad spectrum of social backgrounds, including at one extreme two boys who were in care and, at the other extreme, three boys from a prep school. Apted has apparently claimed that in retrospect, too few women were selected as subjects of the programme, but as Stephen Moss (2012) has noted ‘[t]he choices reflected the world as it was in 1964, when women's place was still in the home and society was split between employers and employees, captains of industry and shop stewards, the professions and the rest’ (np). As the series has progressed, the political focus has shifted: Apted has claimed that ‘[t]he overt politics evaporated […] Society’s changed. The politics of the films are now their lives’ (Apted, quoted in ibid.). He has also distanced the Up series from the new genre of ‘reality television’, asserting that ‘I've always fought to distinguish between documentary films and reality TV. I had to explain when we did 49 Up that reality TV puts people in unusual or contrived situations and sees how they respond. What a documentary does is get a snapshot of what the reality is’ (Apted, quoted in ibid.). Part One (47:17) Part Two (47:16) Part Three (50:17)
Video
 The episodes are presented in their original broadcast screen ratio of 1.78:1, with anamorphic enhancement. Footage from earlier series (originally broadcast in 1.33:1) is here presented matted to 1.78:1. This new series is shot on digital video; and there's clear contrast between the new footage and the inserts from previous series (shot on 16mm).
The original break bumpers are intact.
Audio
Audio is presented via a functional two-channel stereo track.
Extras
There is no contextual material.
Overall
 It’s impossibly to isolate 56 Up from the other entries in this remarkable series. Although 56 Up does what it can to orient new viewers to its subjects, providing montages of past entries into the series in order to deliver some background to its participants, new viewers would be advised to begin with Seven Up! Taken as a whole, the Up series offers a fascinating perspective on the ways in which the lives of its participants have been shaped by their social backgrounds. For those who have followed this series since its inception, or those interested in the documentary form, 56 Up is an essential purchase.
References Kenny, Dianna T, 2012: Bringing Up Baby: The Psychoanalytic Infant Comes of Age. Karnac Books Lee-Wright, Peter, 2010: The Documentary Handbook. Taylor & Francis Mitchell, Alex, 2012: Come the Revolution: A Memoir. NewSouth Publishing Moss, Stephen, 2012: ’56 Up: “It’s like having another family’. The Guardian [Online.] http://www.guardian.co.uk/tv-and-radio/2012/may/07/56-up-its-like-having-another-family Thomson, David, 2010: The New Biographical Dictionary of Film. Hachette (Fifth Edition) This review has been kindly sponsored by: 
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