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'He was like an uncle': Seven Up! star Tony Walker remembers 'visionary' film director Michael Apted

Michael Apted
Michael Apted

In his front room in Loughton in Essex, Tony Walker still has a Broadcasting Press Guild award statuette that rightfully belongs to Michael Apted.

“I went to a posh do in the City of London to accept a lifetime achievement prize on his behalf just before the first lockdown,” he explains, “and it had been sitting here waiting for him to come over from Hollywood to London to collect it.”

Apted, who has died aged 79, had first met Walker in 1964, when he selected him, at the age of seven, to star in his new series, Seven Up!. The cheeky East End schoolboy who wanted to be a jockey was soon winning viewers’ hearts, and it was to be the start of a long and cherished friendship between the two men.

Originally intended as a one-off World in Action special on ITV featuring 14 “ordinary” youngsters from different ends of the social spectrum, Seven Up! made such an impact that it grew into an acclaimed and enduringly popular documentary series. Every seven years, Apted (who had been the researcher on the first show, selecting many of the participants, but directed every one since) gave unflinching updates on what had happened in their lives. 63Up was broadcast in June 2019, when he described the series as “the most important thing I have ever done”.

For cultural historians, it is seen as ground-breaking “reality” TV in a pre-celebrity age. Social scientists study it on university curriculums. But for Walker, now 65 and a black-cab driver in London, it was a family affair. Its creator, he says, was more like an uncle to him.

“Even as a kid, I had no inhibitions around him. I never thought of it as being in a film.  He was my friend. He was a friend of my family and then, when I got married and had kids of my own and now grandchildren, he knew all of them.  He was one of us.”

Tony Walker
Tony Walker

Though latterly Apted’s producer, Claire Lewis, had become the first port of call for the participants between installments, Apted always had, says Walker, “one eye on us”. Based from 1977 in Hollywood, where he made his name as a big-screen director with the Oscar-winner The Coal Miner’s Daughter, he would be straight on the phone if something important was happening in any of the participants’ lives.

“When I was in hospital a few years back, after I’d suffered a pulmonary embolism, Michael was one of the first people to call to make sure I was doing alright,” he remembers. “He was a very dedicated and sincere person.”

Amid all the glamour and glitz of his new life in California, Apted never broke that bond that had been forged between him and the “Up-ers” - as Walker calls himself and the original group – in a series he referred to as “a long view on English society”.

“When his 1999 James Bond film The World Is Not Enough came out and he was in London for the premiere, he arranged a private screening for all the cast and our families.  He even arranged for my wife to have a tour of the studio where it was filmed, and for her to meet Pierce Brosnan.

“And he did the same with the Narnia film he made [2010’s The Chronicles of Narnia: The Voyage of the Dawn Treader], but this time he asked us to bring our grandchildren and he made sure he knew all their names. That’s the sort of man he was.”

One of the threads that ran through the series was the influence of the class system.  “Michael never forgot his roots,” insists Walker. “He was brought up in Ilford in east London before he went to Cambridge with the likes of John Cleese and Trevor Nunn. And although some people argue that class no longer matters in where you end up, I think Michael was right to keep talking about it.”

In the first film, he remembers, “the posh ones were singing ‘Waltzing Matilda’ in Latin while I was running around in the East End with my bum hanging out of my pants.  Those distinctions may have softened over the years, but in society today it is still them and us.  I see it out of my cab window on the streets of London with people sleeping rough.”

One reason he was so pleased to be asked to receive the BPG award on Apted’s behalf, Walker says, was because he firmly believes his honorary uncle was a visionary in the film and TV industry.  “I got quite emotional when they asked me to stand up and say a few words, but there had never been anything like Seven Up!. It was a tiny trickle of a programme that became a monster of success and that was all down to Michael. It was his baby”.

Some of the other original participants of Seven Up! have expressed misgivings about the project over the years. Charles, a Kensington prep school boy, left after 21Up, while John, who became a barrister, pulled out from 28Up, referring to his involvement as “a little pill of poison”. In 49Up, Jackie who grew up in the East End with Walker, exploded on camera, saying to Apted (who was interviewing her, and left the sequence in), “you will edit this as you want. I have no control”.

Walker, however, vehemently rejects any suggestion that Apted was intrusive, manipulative or too influential in shaping how the lives of his subjects turned out. “It has always made me feel good. There were never any tensions between us about what subjects he could ask me about.”

In 35Up, he spoke of finding monogamy a strain, and in 42Up confessed on camera to being unfaithful to his wife.  “I never had any inhibitions because I trusted him totally. He respected me and I respected him. I sometimes feel the sound of his voice in the background to my life, but in a good way.”

And that close connection he had with Apted produced unexpected results. “A few years ago, I had Sigourney Weaver [who starred in Apted’s film, Gorillas in the Mist] in the back of my cab. When she first got in she had a hat down over her face and was very shy.  So I said to her, ‘you and I have got Michael Apted in common. I was one of the kids in Seven Up!’. And she changed immediately, took off the hat, and invited me into Claridges, where was staying, for a good old chat.”

When his wife took him to New York for a 40th birthday treat, Walker spotted Dustin Hoffman in the street and asked him if he could have a picture. As it was being taken, he explained their common ground in having both been in Apted films (Hoffman starred in 1979’s Agatha). “It immediately created a bond and he stayed and talked to us after that.  It may only have been for three or four minutes, but to me it felt like a year”.

The last time Walker met Aspet was at the London screening of the 63Up documentary in 2019.  The director had said that he would like there to be a 70Up. Does Walker think it will happen now he’s gone?  “I’d love the torch to be passed, but that would be up to Claire Lewis who worked so closely with him and us. I’d be proud to do it, in memory of Michael who has been throughout my life not just a friend and part of my family, but an inspiration to me and many others in his industry. I never understood why he didn’t get a knighthood.’