Asif Kapadia will carry the long-running ITV documentary series Up to an finish with a concluding instalment that may air this yr.
The series, which started in 1964 and was voted probably the most influential UK TV present of the last 50 years in 2024, has adopted a gaggle of individuals from childhood to maturity at seven-year intervals and now checks in on them as they method previous age.
The series’ longtime director Michael Apted died in 2021. Kapadia, who’s finest identified for his documentaries about Amy Winehouse, Ayrton Senna and Diego Maradona, now takes management and has described the appointment an “incredible honour and privilege”.
Kapadia stated the documentary was his favorite of all time and that he thought of the unique series “the ultimate portrait of human life”.
Jo Clinton-Davis, ITV’s controller of factual and the commissioner of 70 Up, known as the series a landmark piece of film-making “that has become part of our cultural fabric”, and stated the ultimate instalment was a tribute to Apted.
She stated: “In Asif Kapadia we have an outstanding director who will bring his passion, creativity and incredible flair whilst safeguarding the very precious Up legacy. Ultimately, this is a tribute to the courage of all the cast who continue to share their lives with us so we can see our lives in them.”
The programme was initially supposed as a one-off: a snapshot of the British class system and an examination of the way in which it formed individuals’s lives. Tim Hewat, the founding editor of Granada’s World in Action, created the idea, basing it on the Jesuit saying “Give me the child until he is seven and I will show you the man”.
For the unique 40-minute movie, Apted served as a researcher chargeable for discovering British kids from throughout the category spectrum. Fourteen seven-year-olds have been picked, and a few of them captured viewers’ imaginations instantly, reminiscent of Neil Hughes from Liverpool who declared: “I want to be an astronaut.”
As it grew to become a recurring series, viewers have been ready to see how issues turned out for the kids, together with for Hughes whose life oscillated between despair, squats, homelessness and destitution earlier than he grew to become a lay preacher and Liberal Democrat councillor.
(*70*) to the Guardian in 2019, Hughes stated the Up series was Apted’s “interpretation” of his life. Remarkably, just one participant, Charles Furneaux, requested to finish the experiment early, though some have chosen not to be featured in all of the instalments. Two individuals have died: Lynn Johnson in 2013 and Nick Hitchon, the son of a Yorkshire farmer who grew to become a revered scientist, in 2023.
In 2024, Up topped a list of probably the most influential reveals from the last 5 many years compiled by the Broadcasting Press Guild and chosen through a ballot of the nation’s main TV writers.
When requested in 2012 how lengthy it might run, Apted advised the Guardian: “As long as I’m above ground, I’ll carry on … Maybe if I wasn’t above ground, someone else would take it over.”
His prediction has come true, with Kapadia concluding the story.
