Asif Kapadia to direct 70 Up, last chapter of influential ITV documentary series

Asif Kapadia will bring the long-running ITV documentary series Up to an end with a concluding instalment that will air this year.

The series, which began in 1964 and was voted the most influential UK TV show of the last 50 years in 2024, has followed a group of people from childhood to adulthood at seven-year intervals and now checks in on them as they approach old age.

The series’ longtime director Michael Apted died in 2021. Kapadia, who is best known for his documentaries about Amy Winehouse, Ayrton Senna and Diego Maradona, now takes control and has described the appointment an “incredible honour and privilege”.

Kapadia said the documentary was his favourite of all time and that he considered the original series “the ultimate portrait of human life”.

Jo Clinton-Davis, ITV’s controller of factual and the commissioner of 70 Up, called the series a landmark piece of film-making “that has become part of our cultural fabric”, and said the final instalment was a tribute to Apted.

She said: “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.”

Neil Hughes, who features in the Up series, at 14 and 49. Composite: ITV

The programme was initially intended as a one-off: a snapshot of the British class system and an examination of the way it shaped people’s lives. Tim Hewat, the founding editor of Granada’s World in Action, created the concept, basing it on the Jesuit saying “Give me the child until he is seven and I will show you the man”.

For the original 40-minute film, Apted served as a researcher responsible for finding British children from across the class spectrum. Fourteen seven-year-olds were picked, and some of them captured viewers’ imaginations immediately, such as Neil Hughes from Liverpool who declared: “I want to be an astronaut.”

As it became a recurring series, viewers were able to see how things turned out for the children, including for Hughes whose life oscillated between depression, squats, homelessness and destitution before he became a lay preacher and Liberal Democrat councillor.

Speaking to the Guardian in 2019, Hughes said the Up series was Apted’s “interpretation” of his life. Remarkably, only one participant, Charles Furneaux, asked to end the experiment early, although some have chosen not to be featured in all of the instalments. Nick Hitchon, the son of a Yorkshire farmer who became a respected scientist, was a participant and died in 2023.

In 2024, Up topped a list of the most influential shows from the last five decades compiled by the Broadcasting Press Guild and chosen via a poll of the country’s leading TV writers.

When asked in 2012 how long it would run, Apted told 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.”