We used to blame society. Now we blame ourselves
Revisiting a pioneering documentary exposes the shift from social analysis to psychological voyeurism
In 1964, Paul Almond's camera captured the lives of fourteen seven-year-olds for Granada Television's 7 Up. What began as a simple documentary became media's most extraordinary longitudinal study. By revisiting the same individuals every seven years, later under Michael Apted's direction, the series has spanned six decades. With 63 Up released in 2019, nine films now chronicle the participants across sixty years: a memento mori in real time, as decades have claimed voices through death and those who have since chosen not to participate.
I first watched it as a child in the 1980s. The personalities blazed from the screen: Jackie at seven already looking middle-aged, as she marched her sister to school from the council estate. The camera then panned to the posh boys, Charles and Henry, singing "Waltzing Matilda" in Latin and parroting parental disdain for the Beatles. Mop-topped Liverpudlian Neil burst with chatter, wanting to become an astronaut, while East Ender Lynn Johnson aspired to work in Woolworths. Most unforgettable was Tony from East London. Aways cheerful, laughing, and late for the school lineup, he would become a taxi driver and struggle with a gambling problem.
The twist of fortunes was the point. The original 7 Up was conceived as an explicit class-based analysis, drawing participants from different social strata, from the privileged pupils of elite prep schools to children from London's East End. The Jesuit maxim "Give me a child until he is seven and I will give you the man" underpinned the series' mission to examine how class determines individual lives. We witness how the public school boys seamlessly transitioned into establishment careers, while working-class participants faced different trajectories entirely.
This, occasionally reductive, framework didn't get everything right, of course. Nick Hitchon was a farmer's son from the Yorkshire Dales educated in a one-room village primary school who won a scholarship to Oxford and went on to become a professor of physics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. However, Apted insisted on portraying him as a rural boy for years, even filming him on the farm when he was at Oxford, which Nick found humiliating. The girls were treated right from the start as marriage fodder; the series did not anticipate the feminist revolution and trailed behind it. But even so, whilst sometimes disregarding individual agency, luck and chance, the documentary makers aimed to understand society.
The patient and analytical approach of the 7 Up series contrasts sharply with reality television, which now dominates our TV screens, and deliberately strips away social context in favor of psychological voyeurism. Shows like Big Brother present participants as isolated individuals whose wider backgrounds matter only for interpersonal friction. While Made in Chelsea features wealthy participants, their ‘privilege’ becomes backdrop for romantic entanglements rather than subject for analysis. The broader social forces that shaped their advantages remain unexamined.
Programmes like Love Island or The Real Housewives rely on artificial environments designed solely to amplify the conflict of personalities. Producers manipulate situations by withholding food or sleep, introducing alcohol, and creating arbitrary challenges—all to generate explosive moments for ratings. They use rapid-fire cuts, dramatic music, and selective editing to construct storylines that often bear little resemblance to actual events. There is no engagement with the outside world here.
By contrast, whilst Apted certainly made choices about what and what not to include, the editing serves the life story of the individual rather than creating it. When Tony Walker discusses the ups and downs of his taxi driving career or the temptations of gambling, the camera remains distant, allowing him to speak in complete thoughts rather than soundbites designed for maximum impact.
Where 7 Up asks "How do social structures determine life outcomes?", reality TV asks "Who will sleep with whom?" The former treats participants as representatives of broader social categories; the latter reduces them to eternal personality types.
There has been a transition from social analysis to individual spectacle—we no longer try to understand society but instead ground our theories of change in individual psychology. This shift from social to psychological explanation reflects broader changes in how we understand social change and human behaviour. The decline of class-conscious analysis has coincided with the rise of therapeutic culture, where structural problems are reframed as personal pathologies. Reality television both reflects and reinforces this transformation, offering viewers the sugar rush of immediate drama and the comfort of depoliticized voyeurism.
By replacing social explanations with psychological ones, we've lost something vital: the understanding that individual choices can't be separated from the material conditions that shape them. We've abandoned changing society to focus on changing ourselves.
While reality TV offers manufactured crisis and psychological voyeurism, 7 Up provides something different: genuine insight into how society shapes individual lives. Apted's vision reminds us that some stories can only be told across a lifetime, and that the most compelling drama often lies not in private crisis, but in the collision between individual aspiration and social reality. In an era of psychological reductionism, such clarity is revolutionary.
STRANGERS AND INTIMATES PRESS COVERAGE
I've been busy with interviews about Strangers and Intimates. Here are some highlights and reviews:
Reviews:
Financial Times - Strangers and Intimates hits the pink pages! "Can life still be private?"
The Economist - Nominated as one of the 40 best books of summer
New Statesman - Book of the Week with a thoughtful and expansive review arguing society has forgotten why time away from the public gaze matters.
Podcasts:
The Brendan O'Neill Show - Tiffany and Brendan discuss why tech isn't to blame for privacy erosion, the dangerous melding of personal and political, and what Harry and Meghan reveal about privacy today
Russ Roberts EconTalk - Listen as author Tiffany Jenkins discusses her book, Strangers and Intimates, with EconTalk's Russ Roberts. In this wide-ranging conversation, they explore the role of Martin Luther, J.S. Mill, Reality TV, and social media, among other factors, in creating the norms of the public and private spheres over time and today.