49 Up is on ITV1 tomorrow night at 9pm, with a second episode on September 22 at 9pm
A poignant, human drama in the era of Celebrity Shark Bait
49 Up is a revealing social history, but its power comes from the universal humanity of the stories it reveals
We are about to see the next episode of what is surely the most powerful drama ever screened on British television. Tomorrow night ITV1 will air the latest instalment in a series that began in 1964, when World in Action interviewed a group of seven-year-old children - and which has caught up with them every seven years since. Now those children are 49 years old.
Officially, that makes the programme a documentary. But it is deeper, more touching and more gripping than that label suggests. For what it shows, unfolding before us, is nothing less than the drama of human life.
That must be the reason why the characters have stayed in the public mind, even though they have not been seen or heard since 1998. Mention the programme and instantly people will start speculating: whatever happened to Tony the cabbie or to Neil, the impossibly sweet seven-year-old who dreamed of becoming an astronaut but who was found, aged 28, wandering in the Highlands, homeless, alone and fearing for his sanity? These stories, glimpsed only intermittently, somehow refuse to be forgotten.
The result is what Bruce, the boarding-school boy who at seven confessed "his heart's desire" was to see his daddy, describes as "a living document of the second half of the 20th century". Seen like that, what does 49 Up say about Britain and the way it has changed?
The opening sequence, lifted directly from the 1964 original, confirms immediately that we are barely the same society we once were. It's not just the plummy voiceover or the black-and-white footage of schoolboys in short trousers. It's the message too. "The executive and the shop steward of the year 2000 are seven years old," says the narrator - speaking from a faraway time when those two archetypes represented clear, opposite poles in a society neatly divided.
Granada's intention in 1964 was to make a polemic about class, to show that the course of Britons' lives was determined by their backgrounds. So it showed posh boys at prep school who, aged seven, could confidently name the Oxbridge college they planned to attend - and working-class girls discussing what they would do if they had a lot of money, "like two pounds".
But Britain was to surprise the film-makers. They had divided the nation into toffs and cockney sparrows - and all but forgotten the middle class in between. And yet central to the story of British life over the next four decades would be the huge expansion of the middle class.
This latest programme proves the point. Sure, John, the prep-school boy bound for Trinity Hall, Cambridge, has followed his class destiny and is now a QC with a lovely house in the country. But Tony, the cheeky East End lad, also has a second home - in Spain. In that sense at least, we're all middle class now.
Tony and fellow East Ender Sue proudly show the camera their houses and gardens, spacious and well decked out. They are Thatcher's generation, men and women who in the 1980s were able to make the move denied to their forebears - becoming homeowners. If anyone ever doubted the importance of that step for people's sense of security and self-worth, Tony and Sue are living proof of it.
Not that class has vanished from Britain. We notice that it is the children who started out poor who now have health problems or whose parents died young. Of the working-class kids, none has sent a child to university. Actually that's not strictly true. Paul, who at seven asked: "What does university mean?" did see his daughter go into higher education. But that was in Australia, where Paul emigrated 30 years ago. Among those who stayed in Britain, not one. It seems Granada's original premise - that background determines fate - has held up depressingly well.
Claire Lewis, who produces the series along with director Michael Apted, was struck by how the children who'd been to private schools have uniformly found success, taking top jobs in the law, business and media. "The others have done well too, but they're not running Britain," she told me. In this respect, "they are the way they are because of how they started out".
What's missing from the programme is almost as revealing as what's there. There is only one black participant and only four of the 12 are women. When Lewis confronted Apted about the lack of balance in the original selection, he replied: "Honestly, it never occurred to us." The programme-makers of 1964 saw Britain as a place that was, essentially, white and male.
Still, race is present in the programme. You can hear it in Tony's lament that the East End of his boyhood no longer exists: the streets he used to know are all Asian now. He speaks of this without malice or racism, just a sense of loss. And so he is among those who have sought to recreate white, cockney culture in Essex - and even among his fellow Brits in Spain.
Politics intrudes like that. Bruce has quit teaching in the inner city because, he admits candidly, it wore him down, like water on a stone. Lynn complains of the cost-cutting that could shut the library where she has worked all her adult life. Even in Blair's Britain, vital public services remain in peril.
Social shifts are visible too. When Simon was born, he recalled at age 21, an "illegitimate child was something whispered about". Now, among this group, there are countless children and grandchildren born outside marriage and no one seems to notice.
So 49 Up is a full, revealing social history. And yet that is not the source of its power. That, and its intense poignance, comes instead from the universal human story these lives tell. To see people ageing before our eyes, transforming from children into adolescents into adults into parents and now grandparents, is to witness the narrative of human life itself. Each jump from the smooth, bright-eyed faces of 1964 to the lined, worn faces of today is almost unaccountably moving.
And we realise that the drama that animates most lives is not about governments or politics, but marriages that work or fail, children who are born or missed and jobs that flourish or founder. We see, unavoidably, that people begin their 40s young and end them beginning to look and feel old.
We see the noble impulse that makes people want to correct the mistakes that marred their own childhoods, how those who never knew their parents resolve to become good fathers or mothers; how those who grew up alone now give love to children who would otherwise suffer the same fate.
Above all, we see how people learn to let go of the dreams of their youth. Once they talked of fame or power, of acting in movies or journeying to the moon. Now they accept who they are - and long for nothing more than health and a loving family.
There is a quiet, affecting beauty to all of this. So, in the era of Celebrity Shark Bait, let us give thanks for one of those rare occasions when television reaches beyond the banal - and touches the enduringly, inspiringly human.
mediaguardian
