Don't worry, I won't tell you what happens to Neil (The Up Series)

The Up Series, now pushing 60 - and I'm catching "up," last night watched 42-up. Though this blog contains many spoilers, I will not give away here what happens to Neil, who has become the obvious megastar of this series, the reason we keep watching. The series is an amazing document of the life of an entire generation (of Brits), in some ways obviously fulfilling its starting premise - the lives of the British born ca 1950 are entirely predetermined by their social class - and in some ways disproving the premise. Over time, yes, we've seen clearly that none of the subjects, first interviewed at age 7 and then every 7 years thereafter, has completely left his or her class, but there are dramatic surprises in personality, softening of some of them, troubled youths becoming relatively ok adults, with the exception of Neil. It's also very striking that every one of the impoverished east end kids has moved into much nicer housing, even the struggling single mom has done so. We see from that the era of prosperity in Britain, brief though it was, provided a lot of opportunity for many - but then we see what the East End is like today - entirely populated by a new wave of immigrants, and you wonder what their lives will be like, how they will change England and how England will change them. The series itself is suffering a bit under its own weight - because Michael Apted wants/needs each film to stand alone, as we get father along there is so much backgound material he has to cover for each subject that by "42 Up" we get little new material at age 42 (it the film is still +2 hours); also, the relative different in age diminishes as they subjects age - for some there's not a dramatic difference from 35 to 42.