Mini Season — The Up Series — Episode 1 — 7 Up (1964) and 7 Plus Seven (1970)

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Chase and Sam are taking on the ultimate quest — a boomer Epic of Gilgamesh, Shahnameh, Middlemarch, or Buddenbrooks — if you will.

In honour of Michael Apted's decades-long Up series (1964-2026) coming to an end this autumn, DPP thought a mini series working its way through an English boomer's lifetime would be a great subject to entertain fans and listeners with for the next couple of months.

Tracing the lives of 14 English men and women (and one semi-Scot) born in 1957 over seven-year iterations, the Up series creates a strange kind of self-anthropological study of the UK's post-war era: from social democracy to Thatcherism to Blairism through the lens of individual lives.

First on the docket — 7 Up and 7 Plus Seven, the first two episodes in the set, bookending the start and end of Harold Wilson's liberalising Labour era — when Britain's class system was looking shaky in new ways.