Asif Kapadia directs 70 Up, the final chapter in ITV’s poignant documentary series | documentary

Asif Kapadia will end the long-running ITV documentary series with a finale to be broadcast this year.

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

Series director Michael Apted died in 2021. Kapadia, best known for his documentaries on Amy Winehouse, Ayrton Senna and Diego Maradona, now takes the reins and described the appointment as an “incredible honor and privilege”.

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

Joe Clinton-Davies, ITV fact watcher and 70 Up commissioner, described the series as a landmark piece of filmmaking “that has become part of our cultural fabric”, and said the latest installment was a tribute to Apted.

“In Asif Kapadia we have an outstanding director who will bring his passion, creativity and amazing flair while preserving Up’s very precious legacy. Ultimately, this is a tribute to the courage of all the actors who continue to share their lives with us so that we can see ours in them,” she said.

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

For the original 40-minute film, Apted worked as a researcher responsible for finding British children from across the academic spectrum. Fourteen seven-year-olds were chosen, some of whom instantly captured viewers’ imaginations, such as Liverpool’s Neil Hughes 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 Hughes whose life oscillated between depression, squat, homelessness and destitution before becoming 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 chose not to appear in all parts. Nick Hitchon, the son of a Yorkshire farmer who became a respected scientist, was a participant and died in 2023.

In 2024, Top topped a list of the most influential programs from the past five decades compiled by the Broadcasting Press Guild and selected through a poll of the nation’s top television writers.

Asked in 2012 how long it would take, Apted told The Guardian: “As long as I’m above ground, I’ll keep going… Maybe if I’m not above ground, someone else will take over.”

His predictions came true, as Kapadia finished the story.