The ‘Seventy Up’ programme I mention below that we watched recently reminded me that the participants in the series are my exact contemporaries. This is a photo of me aged seven grinning out from the brick setting of the asbestos-lined boiler that once supplied hot water and steam for my grandfather’s laundry and dry-cleaning business.
1. Here in the UK, Seventy Up, directed by Asif Kapadia, the last in a series of septennial films that began with Seven Up sixty-two years ago, has just been broadcast on ITV. A wonderfully simple idea which filmed the same group of fourteen people every seven years from the age of seven to the age of seventy.
Here’s ‘Seventy Up’ https://youtu.be/Sfc3yyd6mdU
and here are the first nine films in the series https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLBUEM5R_1iKnVw04kW20MD-meZrrIoIDb
Here are two reviews from The Guardian to give you a sense of what the series is about if you don’t already know it:
70 Up review – a deeply moving conclusion for the 63-year-long TV experiment https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2026/sep/15/70-up-review-itv1-itvx
‘It’s the Bayeux tapestry of TV!’ After six decades, the seminal series bows out with 70 Up https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2026/sep/07/seminal-series-ends-six-decades-70-up
Michael Apted, who selected the children to participate in the first film and directed all the subsequent films in the series until his death in 2021, was sometimes criticised for how neatly the series sorted its children by class – and it has struck me over the years that only one participant, Nick, made the same move between social classes that I flatter myself I did. Like me, he came from North Yorkshire; his death from cancer, only three days after recording his final interview, was the motivation for Kapadia’s being asked to make the final programme in the series.
2. Another piece from The Guardian with a seventy-year perspective, The generation raised on sugar rations – and what their health reveals 70 years later https://www.theguardian.com/society/2026/oct/07/sugar-rations-health-blood-pressure-ageing
They were born into a Britain still recovering from the hardships of war. Though the air-raid sirens had fallen silent, many everyday foods remained rationed, including sugar. Adults were restricted to about 3 tablespoons (40g) a day to stretch between cups of tea, baking and desserts; children were limited to less than a tablespoon. Babies and very young children were expected to have little or no added sugar. Then, in 1953, the brakes came off. Separate restrictions on sweets and chocolate were lifted in February, followed by sugar in September. By the second half of 1954, average sugar consumption had almost doubled. The lifting of postwar sugar rationing inadvertently created a natural experiment, whose consequences scientists are only beginning to unpick. A flurry of recent studies suggests that spending the first 1,000 days of life under sugar rationing may have left traces on people’s health more than seven decades later.
And, yes, post-rationing child that I was, I do have Type 2 diabetes ….
3. From Geoff Mulgan on his Substack, The Case for Cognitive Rearmament: taking misinformation and cognitive decline seriously
https://geoffmulgan.substack.com/p/the-case-for-cognitive-rearmament
IQ levels began to reverse at the beginning of this century in some of the richest countries, including the UK, Germany and Denmark. The PISA scores measuring school children’s levels of attainment peaked in 2012 and then started to decline, with sharp falls in reading, maths and science. The annual Monitoring the Future study in the US found a significant rise in the proportion of 18-year-olds who struggle to concentrate or learn new things, while 25% of adults in high-income countries (and 35% in the US) are now unable to use “mathematical reasoning when reviewing and evaluating the validity of statements”. These patterns have coincided with declines in everyday civility, including a willingness to listen and learn. In the US, a majority now believe their fellow citizens to be morally bad, which may explain why people move so fast towards angry intolerance.
4. Three years on from the Hamas October 7th attack on Israel, here’s a gift article from The Atlantic by Adam Kirsch, What Is Zionism? https://tinyurl.com/4x62cfrs
Zionism was coined in the 1890s to name the organized political movement to create a Jewish state. After that goal was achieved with the establishment of the State of Israel, in 1948, the label continued to be claimed by people who took pride in its existence and wanted it to survive and thrive. This included most American Jews, but not only them. Two weeks after the Hamas attack, President Joe Biden visited Tel Aviv and declared, “I don’t believe you have to be a Jew to be a Zionist, and I am a Zionist.” It’s unlikely that those words will be heard again from an American president, of either party …
5. And, finally, a great piece from Elif Shafak on her Unmapped Storylands blog, The Golden Emotion of Love and Longing, about – but not only about – the game of backgammon https://elifshafak.substack.com/p/the-golden-emotion-of-love-and-longing
A game born in Ancient Mesopotamia more than 5000 years ago has journeyed beyond borders: of time, geography and identity. From Persia to the Far East, from Greece to Rome, from northern Europe to towns and cities across America. It has appeared in humble cottages as well as mansions and palaces, emerging vividly in the writings of Chaucer and Shakespeare. Every evening, Charles Darwin had made it a habit to play backgammon with his wife and he was notoriously competitive, always determined to win. Lewis Carroll, the author of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland was also very fond of the game, as was the philosopher David Hume.
Claude Confession (verbatim)
“Asked to check this post, I made two errors of my own. First, relying on a summary of a press article rather than the article itself, I told Roy that Nick died “hours” after his final interview and suggested he soften the claim that Nick’s death prompted the last film. Roy, who had read the producer’s own words, put me right on both counts. Then, in correcting Roy’s sentence about Michael Apted, I confidently credited Apted with directing every film in the series, quietly airbrushing out Paul Almond, who directed the original Seven Up! in 1964. Seven years to the next instalment of my fact-checking career seems about right. (If you’d like something shorter, the last line works on its own as a punchline after just the first two sentences.)”
