In advance, I confidently imagined that 70 Up would be the big programme of the week. In the event, it rather disappointingly felt more like the set-up for the big programme of next week. Or at least let’s hope so – because up to now we’ve had little of what many of us were anticipating with unusual keenness: the much-loved participants in one of British TV’s greatest achievements reflecting at 70 on lives that we’ve been following since whenever we first started watching grown-up telly.

The Up series famously began as a one-off documentary in 1964 about a carefully mixed bunch of 14 English seven-year-olds. Back then, its political agenda wasn’t hard to spot. While the posh kids – first seen singing ‘Waltzing Matilda’ in Latin – specified which Oxbridge college they’d be going to, a boy in a children’s home asked: ‘What’s a university?’

Piddington and the idiocy of middle-class progressivism

Sydney Sweeney is hot. Who cares?

Green party activists turn on ‘genocide denier’ Zack Polanski

After Michael Apted made the game-changing decision to revisit these people every seven years, the programme’s overarching concern with class continued into their late........

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