In 1963, Michael Apted's seminal 'World in Action' documentary 'Seven Up' aimed to examine the old proverb 'Give me the child until he is seven, and I will show you the man', and to look at the way class had conditioned the attitudes and expectations of fourteen English children, drawn from a wide variety of backgrounds.
Every seven years since, Apted has revisited and re-interviewed the fourteen, tracing their lives through school, marriage and careers, from the Oxbridge barrister and the East End jockey turned London cabby, to the public school boy who dropped out to teach in the Third World. Throughout these lives, the choices, successes and failures of the fourteen, the documentaries have provided a unique document of the social history of post-war Britain, as well as a fascinating exploration of human lives and human nature.
