BBC: "Apted: 'Seven Up should have had more girls'"

'56 Up' will be shown on ITV on Monday 14 May, at 21:00 BST 

Link to BBC web site

"Director Michael Apted says it was a 'horrible error' to have only four females in a cast of 14 when making the original selection for the 7 Up documentary in 1964.

"He made the comment at a screening of '56 Up', the eighth episode in the long-running social documentary series.

" '56 Up' is as engaging as the previous seven series. It brings up to date the stories of a group of ordinary people, who are individually unique but collectively represent Everyman. ... Taken as a whole, the eight documentaries rank among the finest ever made."

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Link to Wikipedia page

"The Up Series is a series of documentary films produced by Granada Television that have followed the lives of fourteen British children since 1964, when they were seven years old. The documentary has had seven episodes spanning 42 years (one episode every seven years) and the documentary has been broadcast on both ITV and BBC.

"The original hypothesis of Seven Up! was that class structure is so strong in the UK that a person's life path would be set at birth. The producer of the original programme had at one point thought to line the children up on the street, have three of them step forward and narrate 'of these twenty children, only three will be successful' (an idea which was not used). The idea of class immobility held up in most, but not all, cases as the series has progressed. The children from the working classes have by and large remained in those circles, though Tony seems to have become more middle class.

"Apted has said that one of his regrets is that they did not take into account feminism, and consequently had fewer girls in their study and did not select them on the basis of any possible careers they might choose."