Bill Harvey: Sons of the North

In an unexpected moment of serendipity at this year’s Silmo Academy event, I heard about the Born in Bradford NHS project for the first time.

Apart from directing one of my favourite films as a teenager, the heartfelt but sadly dated P’tang, Yang, Kipperbang, filmmaker Michael Apted is probably best remembered for Seven Up, his long-running series of documentaries that began in 1964. The then novel idea was to follow in real-time a selection of seven-year-old children as they went through life. Along the way, there were interviews with all of the participants about their experiences of matters as profound as love, money, race and opportunity. It offers a window into the lives of people from a range of backgrounds as they grew up in the UK and is set to continue in 2026, at which point the subjects will be in their 70s.