How We Spend Our Days
Seven Up, the long running TV documentary series, becomes a meditation on what life is for. A Thought for the Day for BBC Radio 4. Listen here.
One newspaper has called it ‘televisions greatest ever project’ and they have a point.
70 Up is the final installment of an experiment begun with a group of seven year olds in 1964.
Every seven years the cameras have returned to see how life is going for those original ten boys and four girls. Now they are seventy.
The series has followed Neil, who wanted to be an astronaut, drifting into homelessness, finding a way into politics, becoming a church minister and, all the while, living with depression.
Suzy, practising ballet in the first film, dropped out of school and headed to Paris but returned to raise a family and find meaning as a bereavement counsellor.
Seven year old Bruce told the cameras we should be giving most of our money to the poor. Later he became a teacher in London’s east end.
Librarian Lynn has died while, in the first episode of the new series, nuclear physicist Nick, discloses that he’s living with cancer.
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The original aspiration was to examine class in the light of the Jesuit saying, ‘give me a child until they are seven and I’ll give you the adult.’
The tram lines of privilege remain clear down the decades but now this rare documentary becomes a kind of meditation on what a life is for — where we find happiness, what brings us peace.
‘How we spend our days’, wrote the author Annie Dillard, who died this week, ‘is how we spend our lives’.
With most of their days behind them, the seniors of 70 Up carry joy mixed with grief, pride mixed with regret.
Symon, raised in a children’s home, weeps that he will never know who his Dad was. But he and his wife are celebrated now, by a hundred young people — those they have fostered over the years.
Reflecting on camera for the last time, some find solace in solitude, some in service. Some have reimagined the faith they grew up in.
Bruce ditched the Church of England to become a Quaker, finds joy in a choir and helping on the local lifeboat. He’d prefer his sons were ‘moral atheists’ rather than ‘religious hypocrites’.
In The Road to Character David Brooks distinguishes between what he calls our ‘résumé virtues’ — accomplishments in education or career — and our ‘eulogy virtues’ — what people might say about us when we die.
At your funeral, no one will mention your salary. They will recall the parent who loved their kids, the friend you could always trust, the partner who listened.
Eulogy virtues are not about qualifications in a life but the quality of a life. They are the glue holding us together during life’s most difficult days.
Maybe this life is not measured by what we achieve but by who we become. Wherever we started off.
