I Am Down With The Up Series
“Give me the child until he is seven and I will give you the man.” It’s impossible to talk about the Up series without beginning with this Jesuit maxim. It was 1964, Cassius Clay was the heavyweight champion of boxing, Nikita Khrushchev was ousted from Soviet power, and a still wet-behind-the-ears Michael Apted (later, director of Coal Miner’s Daughter and Gorillas in the Mist, among others) interviewed fourteen 7-year-olds from England for a Granada Television documentary. The premise was simple. The results were anything, but. Take fourteen children from all social backgrounds, visit them at the age of seven, and […]