Ordinary People
Atlantic, The, December, 2006 by Clive Crook
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In 1964 a documentary called Seven Up! first aired on British television. Simple in conception, it consisted of interviews with fourteen seven-year-old children. They were asked about their lives, their friends, their ambitions—and they were artfully chosen to represent different economic segments of English society.
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The filmmakers had a thesis to advance, bound up with the British preoccupation with class and class-based predestination and expressed in the Jesuit maxim “Give me a child until he is seven, and I will give you the man,” words the narrator speaks at the start of the film. Here is the future of British society, he announces, already formed in these youngsters. The film caused a stir in Britain when it was first broadcast, and it remains fascinating. The children are endlessly interesting, and so are the uncalculated, incidental glimpses one sees over their shoulders of the Britain of forty years ago. But Seven ...
