70 Up - ITV teaser for "later this year"

[Rostio]

This looks fabulous!

My favourites Neil, Symon and Bruce are mentioned, Suzy and Charles return to the programme and tributes to the lovely Nick, Lynn and of course Michael Apted.

Placemark here for sharing the latest news?

The patronising questions to Symon reinforce my belief that racism in the UK is sharply entwined with classism and very different to the US’s racism problem.

Edit - autocorrect of Symon.

My mistake - someone told me the rabbit was new! I’d forgotten it. Poor Suzy being put on the spot as a 14 yr old about her dog behaving doggily

Yes, the bunny murder was aired at 14, as others said, but I also did notice there were a few little bits of extra footage. Even for familiar bits.

But I wanted to see FAR more of the participants and their families at 70 and yes it was disappointing in that sense. It sounds from that Guardian article and the producer wanting to do hour long specials that that is not what we're going to get even in the second part. I don't think it's "confusing" the way it's cut, it's just more being done thematically than person by person, but not getting a proper catch up at 70 is a huge shame because that's what most viewers are interested in and have been waiting for, and the hype has been enormous. I also think it's rubbish that they're not showing the two main eps back to back and making people wait a week. it's like ITVX couldn't really be arsed.

I thought it was off that one of the adults (interviewer or crew) didn’t intervene to try and save the bunny. I can understand it in wildlife docs where you don’t get involved in disturbing the natural food chain. But this was a domestic situation. 🐰

To someone living on a farm or, presumably, to landed gentry (I don't know any) a rabbit is a pest not a cute bunny so letting a dog kill it would be fine. I think it drew attention to different lifestyle and class rather than animal cruelty.

"stand up for yourselves” (because nobody else will) and children being expected to fight their own battles for the main part were definitely the norm where I grew up - inner city schools. Only the most extreme behaviour was dealt with by teachers. We all learned early that we needed to rely on ourselves (and our families) because there were no freebies of the type the “posh” children received (which is ironic as the wealthy children seemed to be learning self reliance or fall for different reasons). Maybe its more of a class divide in schooling in the 50s/60s/70s.

Yes I know plenty of country dwelling dogs which catch their own dinners. Dogs generally kill quickly - I think if my destiny was a dogs stomach the life of the rabbit and a quick death is certainly no worse that being intensively farmed chicken!

Meh - money doesn’t make you happy but it gives you a lot more options in life when problems arise. Its a lot easier to cruise through life with money and its not an accident that financial strain is a factor in a very high percentage of family breakdowns.

This was absolutely fascinating. It’s my era so looking back was so interesting. The young women being asked about marriage was so sexist. I can’t believe how young they looked at 21, which is the age I got married.

I broadly agree with @PsychoHotSauce commentary on Neil. There was a lot of commentary after one series about Neil having schizophrenia or bi polar (as it was at the time) - possibly 35up? I don’t think I’d have remembered such a discussion from 28up if I saw it at the time. There was a point at which the programme had struggled to track him down and Cambridge was reported as wanting to speak to him about a university place.

Neil has said on camera that he doesn’t take his meds which I’d assumed were for BPD or SX rather than an diagnosis of autism - its very hard to help anyone with a mental health condition or ND diagnosis if they don’t want to be helped.

I felt very sorry for Neil but also felt the way he blamed everyone else (especially his parents) for his own choices and problems was part of his issues. He is not the only intelligent pupil to fail the Oxford entrance or the first to have a chip on his shoulder about it (Charles Furneaux had a hefty chip about it in 21up) but that doesn’t explain decades of behaviour where everyone else is at fault.

Did Neil blame anyone else for making his choices? Not that I can recall. He’s barely mentioned his family or ex-wife.

He blamed his parents in several of the episodes. There was a fair bit of passive aggressive type blame when it came to women - “I’m difficult to live with but…” type comments appeared regularly.

Neil plainly has problems which are genuine. He has also generally not wanted to engage with help - interactions have to be on his terms. As pp pointed out - his activities are generally those which brought him an audience and things had to be done his way. Its really hard to help someone like this however sympathetic you are to their challenges.

One thing I find frustrating about this show is how little Neil has talked about his background and his relationships. Regarding his family, I wonder what kind of people (possibly) turn their backs on their adult child as they may have done in his 20s and to some extent 30s? He was homeless for a long time and clearly struggling with his mental health. Maybe my hunch is wrong, though. We’ll probably never know one way or another.

There was a point in either 21 or 28 where he was talking 'around' the subject of his parents, and I got the impression that it was his choice to leave and turn his back on them, rather than the other way around. I have no doubt that he found the relationship intolerable, but then there were lots of things that he just couldn't cope with. He also alluded to starting various jobs and then just leaving after a short period, and not on good terms. Which could explain the constant moving around from place to place as well. He mellowed a little by 35 and spoke that the relationship with his parents had mended somewhat because they had both started to understand what minor grievances weren't worth falling out over.

His parents were both teachers. It's possible he couldn't bear 'disappointing' them by not getting into Oxford, and it's also possible that they fuelled that with harsh comments about his path in life, which drove him away. It's also possible he reacted extremely badly to any perceived criticism (as I suspect was the reason behind him leaving so many casual jobs), and his pride prevented him going back when he hit rockbottom.

We've just watched all of these through from the beginning. I'm a bit younger than the participants. I'm not sure what it tells us, I've said previously it's very obvious the difference in the types of questions that were asked based on MA's perception and pigeonholing of each individual. Nick says in an interview they they always wanted to film him on the farm to emphasise his rurality and at one point were shooing sheep behind him!

MA says somewhere that he accepts that he was wrong in the gender balance and that he hadn't expected the girls lives to amount to anything or be interesting. I imagine to those of us who remember those times that won't be a surprise and helps to show the progression that has been made in the intervening years.

It became apparent in the 70 up episode that there is more footage that we haven't seen and that there were other stories we didn't know (not unsurprisingly) like barrister John's father dying, leaving his mother in financial difficulty, a year in the army before a full scholarship to Oxford. Whilst it's absolutely right that the family had privacy, the truth also wouldn't have suited the "posh boy with silver spoon" narrative.

I'm hoping there might be more after these episodes as I suspect different editing of the original footage (if it all exists), may bring value.

Like others I'm grateful to those who took part.

The bunny murder was in at 14 but then the clip was cut short in later episodes so it wasn't so apparent. I'm surprised they put the whole thing back in now.

The 3 x 63 up episodes are worth watching, they have the feel that they all thought they might be the last and there is an element of closure around some of the interviews, plus more openness around the participants frustrations with the questioning and portrayal over the years.

I started school in Harrow in 1959 and taught in inner city schools in London in the 80s. There were certainly incidents but I don't remember it being accepted.

I think something else that may be pertinent with Neil is that there wasn’t the awareness of neurodivergence that there is now (nowhere near) so maybe his parents didn’t know how to support him properly, or didn’t try to.

In an interview he did in 2019, he said his mother tried to mould him into something he wasn’t but by the end of her life he said she accepted him. He also said he was diagnosed with a “nervous complaint” at 16.

He clearly stated that his condition makes it impossible for him to sustain a normal day to day personality with partners. He is obviously well educated but holds this idea that he is destined for some great role in life but his mental issues take away from that. His refusal to take any treatment has lead to his way of life. I could have wept watching him running through the rain in Shetland with his carrier bag.

I remember the rabbit scene, in the original episode, and how very unconcerned the girl was.

I don’t think it’s ever been shown so graphically before.

Barbaric isn't it? My Uncle was boarding at five and didn't even go home in the holidays.

I find it frustrating that no explanations are given or questions asked. He referred to the fact that he's had no consistency at all in his life and seemed very vehement and bitter about this. Yet what did he mean? Something about his home life or parents has damaged him but we are given no indication of what that is.

I was horrified that all the public school boys had been told by their parents what their entire adulthood would be like at 7!! Really shocking.

There was some quite significant footage actually that we hadn't seen. Which demonstrates how things had been edited/cut, so how Apted (and any other documentary maker) would impose their narrative on it.

Some was minor, where you'd get an extra bit of the original interview that gave more context, but some elements had never been shown at all. For example, we had never before heard about Tony's devastation regarding being told he was the wrong weight and feeling later he'd made the wrong decision with giving up being a jockey. We all saw him again and again through the years saying he just "wasn't good enough" so we might all have assumed it was because he didn't do better in that particular race, but we didnt ever hear the whole story, which really must have been completely devastating for someone who'd wanted to do that since he was a kid.

Likewise, Paul reconnecting with his mother and her side of his family, which really is major, and we now know happened pretty early in the run. We did only find out about John and his family background and circumstances much later on (56 up, iirc) at his insistence, even Andrew (as I understand it) is the child of two European parents, so not exactly the quintessential toff English kid either. I think it just goes to show that documentary-making, even "real life" footage, once it's edited, gets given whatever the narrative the director wants to make of it.

So yeah, I agree with you. There's a LOT to be gained from someone different looking at footage. But in this, I still think a great deal will have been missed.

I suppose, though, people don't have to say what they don't want to, even if we would rather they did! After all, they were picked randomly and it's not their job to live their lives for our entertainment. It's not about us.

I too think something happened to Neil before 14, as he is so different. Not just adolescence - I mean, he's just so incredibly anxious at that point. Bullying, maybe, or the shock of being with kids just as smart as him. A lot of his criticisms were about his feeling that his parents didn't prepare him for "real life" or those kinds of challenges. Or that's what I inferred.