As a result, the films do tell us much about the nature of class and social change in Britain across the past half century. Film reviewers treat the Up series as an entirely original endeavor, a unique attempt to document the relationship between individual aspiration and social change across a lifetime. But in fact, sociologists and ethnographers have been tilling this furrow for decades. The most creative such project is, perhaps, Mass Observation, which since 1937 has episodically enlisted ordinary Britons in constructing an ethnography of everyday life, including by writing diaries. Social scientists took up the challenge also through cohort studies that tracked the health, educational, and career outcomes of children born in 1945, 1958, and 1970 and through studies that interrogated thousands of subjects about community life at midcentury, the move from slums to new towns in the ’50s, the rise of commercial culture and affluence in the ’60s, and the impact in later decades of deindustrialization, political polarization, and new social movements.

In the last few years, historians have returned to those records, trying to free them from the conclusions that the interviewers (much like Apted) drew before the subjects could even open their mouths. In Me, Me, Me? The Search for Community in Post-War England, Jon Lawrence goes back to the interview notes from 10 postwar community studies to see whether people really had abandoned solidarity for individualism. Unsurprisingly, the truth is more subtle. People often supported what we might call social democratic values—the belief, for example, that the state should ensure that prosperity lifts all boats—while embracing aspiration (especially for their children) and the post-’60s view that they ought to be able to think and live as they please. Economic crisis and, still more, neoliberal policies hit that consensus hard: Cuts and privatization created winners and losers, even as social safety nets were shredded. And yet the cultural changes wrought by the ’70s were deep enough and profound enough that no one quite wanted to see the clock turned back. Women in particular did not mourn a past in which their horizons were sharply constrained.

As Florence Sutcliffe-Braithwaite argued in Class, Politics, and the Decline of Deference in England, 1968–2000, although class continued to matter—even as inequality worsened—people resisted labeling themselves by class; the very word seemed snobbish or blinkered. Most preferred to say they were ordinary, and yet they were still able to define complex identities for themselves. In a recent article, Sutcliffe-Braithwaite and three other historians (Emily Robinson, Camilla Schofield, and Natalie Thomlinson) trace how the social movements of the ’70s underwrote that shift in identification. Race and gender, they argue, had become as generative of social identities and social politics as class. The divergent trajectories but shared optimism of Sue, Lynn, and Jackie make sense in this framework. Much as they deplored the harshness of austerity Britain, all three felt that their lives were fuller, happier, more varied, and more interesting than they could have predicted. The world, though much more precarious, had split open and let them in.

The Up series has now been with us for a lifetime. Countless viewers have identified with its subjects’ trials and triumphs—especially, judging from the letters that pour in to the newspapers after each episode, if they are of the same generation. I am close in age to Apted’s subjects, which made watching 63 Up a rather melancholy affair. Having raised children and (often) buried parents, this cohort has become sharply aware of its own mortality. John’s law practice seems to be winding down, and Andrew, who had a demanding career at a major international firm, has retired early. He regrets not spending more time with his family, and he and Jane want to have some good years together while they still have their health. Bruce has cut back his teaching, happy to let Penny’s career take precedence. He worries about his weight and dreads not old age but the “disabling, degenerating conditions linked with [it].” So, with reason, does Neil, who has lived most of his life in the rural areas where he feels more comfortable and who has, as he says, “relied upon my body very much.” Over the decades, we’ve watched wiry Neil tramp through Scotland or Cumbria. Now he bicycles to the nearest village from the cottage he acquired, with a small inheritance after his mother’s death, in rural France.

There is sadder news, too. Nick, still teaching at the University of Wisconsin, has developed throat cancer. He isn’t frightened for himself, he tells Apted, but he dreads the effect on those close to him. And Lynn, who had what she thought was just a minor accident—a bump from a swing when taking her grandson to the park—went to a hospital and suddenly and incomprehensibly died. With her rock-solid marriage and close family, she had always been a bit irritated by Apted’s endless questions. “I’m happy with the way my life has gone,” she told him shortly in 56 Up. Five years after her death, her daughters dissolve into tears when speaking of her. Lynn is remembered for her dedication to the East End’s children. St. Saviour’s primary school, where she was a governor for over 25 years, named its refurbished library after her. “I don’t think I quite realized just how much she was adored by the wider community,” one of her daughters confesses.

Other participants are thinking about their lives and legacies, too. Revealingly, both of the middle-class boys are now doing what the aspirant and educated do when they want to leave a mark: writing. (Neil has an unpublished autobiography and Peter an unpublished novel.) But the difference between the world they faced as young adults in the late ’70s and the one facing their children and grandchildren has driven a few to an understanding—which the previously mentioned historians could not better—of how the collectivist entitlements and values of the ’70s cushioned their early difficulties and underwrote their later successes. Sue’s divorce didn’t derail her, she tells us, because she had “wonderful support from the council.” It helped her get and then later buy her flat, a bit of good luck that changed her life. With council housing now scarce and the National Health Service underfunded, she worries that the young face a much more precarious future than she did.

Peter, who so offended Thatcherites in 1984, agrees. Stuck in low-paying jobs in hospitality or call centers and with no hope of acquiring property, those in the next generation, he says, might be the first to have things worse than their parents. Even self-made Tony, who dreamed of owning a sports bar in Spain, has felt neoliberalism’s hard edge, with Uber and other ride-share apps cutting his and Debbie’s cabbie earnings by a third. A Leave voter during the Brexit campaign, he says he will never vote Tory again.

This reflectiveness is surely a byproduct of the project itself: One can’t be turned into a historical subject without it having some effect. Apted’s “children” have been forced to live examined lives, and this changed them in profound ways. Understandably, some have regretted ever getting caught in the net. In 35 Up, John memorably called the series “a little pill of poison” inserted into his life every seven years, and in 42 Up, Suzy said the films stir up “lots of baggage.” (She opted out of this last installment.) But most remain loyal to the project, to one another, and thereby, in a strange sense, to the social whole they are collectively meant to represent. Sue, for example, is happy to take part precisely because she thinks of herself as quite ordinary and hence useful. “The things we’re going through, everyone’s going through,” she says. And a few seem to love it. One is the ebullient Tony, who was once driving the astronaut Buzz Aldrin in his taxi when someone stopped them to ask for an autograph—Tony’s, he was shocked to discover. Another, more surprisingly, is Jackie. Asked how she could enjoy appearing in the series so much, given her often acrimonious relationship with Apted, she replies, “I told him off. I didn’t kill him!” Indeed, she, like several of the other “children,” has grown protective of Apted, who, however old they may be now, is older still. (He turns 80 next year.)

An unspoken question thus hangs over 63 Up: Will there be another installment? I am not sure that matters. Apted’s series is already a masterpiece and one that will last. Despite all the backtalk his subjects gave him and the way the series adjusted to credit their views, the project has much to say about the power of social class, even if people now insist on their right to contest its strictures and to define its meaning for themselves.