63 Up

Time to dust off the keyboard. Well, what I mean is it is time to dust off the non-rugby league writing keyboard. I might not have cobbled anything together for this column in a while but I write about rugby league at least twice a week. They even let me speak about it on the radio too, which is bad news for fans of Louie McCarthy-Scarsbrook, expansionism and Eddie Hearn.

Today I want to talk to you about something off the telly. More and more we are developing into a society which, when it is not looking at its phone and entering into political debate with strangers on Twitter, is sat on its sofa watching one of the now gazillions of TV programmes that are at our disposal either live or on a multitude of catch-up platforms. Telly is a subject on which we all seem to have an opinion. Specifically I want to talk to you about 63 Up which is on ITV this week, starting its run on Tuesday (June 4) and broadcasting on consecutive nights up to and including Thursday (June 6).

ITV is normally full of rot. Piers Morgan make my eyes bleed and my ears swell. On the very same night that they launched the new run of 63 Up ITV threw another series of the irksome Love Island at us over on one of its sister stations. No doubt the viewing figures will show that our idiot nation was far more engaged with that than with 63 Up. Yet 63 Up is different from the normal, run of the mill reality shows that now dominate the schedules. This is genuinely compelling, ground-breaking telly that stays with you. The others are heavily edited and feature people just desperate to be on TV for whom Charlie Brooker’s memorable phrase ‘look at me turdhole’ was surely coined.

For those of you not familiar with the concept 63 Up is the latest instalment in a documentary film which was first made in 1964 charting the lives of 14 children through new episodes every seven years. The central idea behind it was to explore the old quote attributed to Aristotle that goes something like ‘give me a child until he is 7 and I will show you the man’. The notion that you can still see aspects of the children we were no matter how old we get and what life throws at us.

The first episode took up the story of four of our subjects. Firstly there was Tony, first seen in 1964 as a seven-year old falling flat on his face in one hilarious yet also slightly sad clip. You shouldn’t laugh at a child falling over and it does make you feel sorry for him but it is also undeniably funny. At that point he talks about his ambition to become a jockey, an ambition he fulfilled to an extent riding in the same race as legendary tax dodger Lester Piggott at Kempton Park. Yet Tony’s career in the sport never really took off and he ended up in Spain after various stints as a London cab driver. He also does some work as an extra, and will be appearing in an upcoming film about football called ’90 minutes’. I did wonder whether his involvement in the Up series over the last 56 years had anything to do with giving him a leg up in this regard, but I let the thought pass.

There’s an honesty about Tony that you can’t dislike. Previous episodes chronicled the trouble he got into with his marriage thanks to his own misdemeanours with other women, but he and his wife have come through all that and are still together today, living in a semi-retirement village for the over 50s in Essex. They have brought up their granddaughter as their own because of the personal problems experienced by their own daughter, though all of their other children have managed to find their own way in life and seem happy and healthy.

The one Tony moment that makes you want to put your fist through the TV is when director Michael Apted asks Tony’s opinion on Brexit. Seems a pertinent question to put to a man who has had to return from living in Spain for economic reasons, and in any case it is probably the most burning topic that has emerged since the show was last aired as 56 Up in 2012. Tony voted to leave the European Union, but regrets it because he doesn’t feel that leaving is now feasible. That seems a fairly sensible conclusion at which to arrive. Leaving might not have seemed like such a bad idea until it became clear that it would cause such economic uncertainty and that there would be no way of implementing it without risking the peace achieved in Northern Ireland.

The problem I have with Tony’s politics is that as we go back to old episodes of the Up series we repeatedly see him complain about how people from his working class background – he’s from the east end of London – don’t have the same opportunities as those born into wealth. Yet despite this he proudly states that he has always voted Tory. Only their failure to deliver Brexit has persuaded him not to vote Conservative. So on the one hand he is angered by the plight of the working class in a system set up so that the rich get richer and the poor get poorer, yet on the other hand he votes Tory and has done all of his life. You just can’t help some people.

Andrew comes from a slightly more affluent background than Tony, and of all the four that we see in this first episode appears to me to be the one to have been through the least change since we first saw him as a 7-year-old singing Waltzing Matilda in Latin with his school friends. His family life is stable with his children all leading quiet, hard working lives just as he has. He is a lawyer and seems to understand and appreciate what his background, education and chosen occupation have given him. There’s even still a physical resemblance to 7-year-old Andrew, still thin, gawky looking but with significantly less hair and significantly more visible forehead.

When we meet up again with Sue there’s a rather bracing moment from when she was 14 and is asked about marriage. It’s bracing because it seems to infer that the most important question anyone can think of to ask a 14-year-old girl is whether or not she wants to be someone’s wife. This strikes me as a fairly old fashioned attitude towards women but let’s remember that Sue was 14 in 1970. Gender equality is not quite a done deal, not quite over the line in 2019. It was a million miles away in 1970 so it probably seemed like an obvious thing to talk to a young girl about. You would hope that if they began the series now and were interviewing 14-year-old girls about their aspirations they would not be confined to the companionship of some moody, male dependent.

Sue wasn’t big on marriage in 1970 but this did not prevent her from being divorced by the time she was 35. To be fair she has learned her lesson. She is currently engaged to a man called Glen and has been for the last 20 years. Neither are in any rush to get hitched. I can get on board with this approach. I have been with Emma for 20 years also, and neither of us have any interest in getting married. My view is that it is an outdated institution that has its roots not only in religion which I detest but also in ownership and control. It wasn’t until as recently as 1991 that a man was finally prosecuted for the crime of raping his wife. Until then the legal reality was that he was perfectly entitled to do so on the grounds that she had given her consent at all times upon committing to the marriage. If we are as civilised as we should be as a society then I would like to think that in a hundred or so years from now people will look back on the idea of marriage with wild-eyed wonder and befuddlement.

The final subject this week was Nick, a product of the Yorkshire Dales who became a nuclear physicist and now lives in the shit show that is Trump’s America. He’s a big fan of America but thankfully not of right wing, orange-raced sex offender Trump. There always seemed to be a sadness around Nick which comes across sharply when he describes the birth of his son as the one moment of pure, unadulterated joy in his life. Sadder still is the fact that Nick is now battling against throat cancer. Ever the teacher, Nick takes us through his treatments and the possible ramifications of them. It always seemed unlikely that all 14 of the children filmed back in 1964 would make it this far without any of them ever having to go through these kinds of horrors. Statistically they are all but inevitable. Yet as Nick explains his current philosophy on life which is to view things very much in the short term it’s still a shocking moment. An ‘oh-no’ moment that jars. That’s the beauty of the Up series versus the reality TV bile that it is accused of being a precursor to. You see the characters often enough and at various stages of their life to become really invested in what happens to them, but not so much that you want to take a swipe at their head with a spade. The latter is the effect of a summer spent watching 12 twats in a house or some such showing off in the relatively shorter time frame of one summer. Most reality TV shows are manufactured, fake and most of all total and utter overkill.

I can relate to Nick’s current view on the world. I don’t have cancer and never have, but I do have kidneys with all the usefulness of Dominic Raab. When you face the prospect of a transplant and possibly dialysis before that you do start to live your life in shorter chunks. You don’t plan too far ahead. At my last appointment with the renal psychologist we chatted for a good while about how nice it is that currently I can stop worrying about anything kidney-related until the end of July thanks to a slight upturn in function. Two stress-free months isn’t a whole lot in the grand scheme of things. That wouldn’t have seemed all that comforting to me at one time, in fact it would probably have frightened me more than Anne Widdecombe does.

The difference of course is that I have every reason to believe that my transplant will be successful and that after that I will be able to live as full a life as I would had I never experienced any kidney disease. For Nick things are less certain it seems. Cancer survival rates have improved vastly over the course of his lifetime so perhaps he will be lucky, but there are no guarantees against such an awful, evil disease that still claims far too many lives.

Though I still have two more episodes to enjoy I hope Nick and the others, including the 78-year-old Apted who must be nearing retirement after a great career in film and television, is around for 70 Up in 2026.