John detested Michael Apted and you can see the weight lifted off him now

Michael Apted always had a clear idea of how he wanted to portray John; a spoilt, snivelling, privileged man who has everything he wanted given to him on a plate. It was interesting to see the parallels between how he portrayed John and how he portrayed Jackie and neither of them liked it (I met Jackie once and she was lovely, I do love how she stuck up for herself). 70Up was the first time John was able to represent himself as a man who was, yes, incredibly fortunate but ultimately chose to do good things with his position of power. Unfortunately, John can’t help the class he was born into, he chose to take the opportunities that were there for him and having cameras in his life every seven years will have been invasive, especially when you’re being painted as the pompous villain because of things you’ve said as a child. You can see how uncomfortable he felt at 21 and he must have been in a tricky position; either agree to do it and try to right the wrongs of how he’d been presented in the previous episode, or don’t do it and leave people assuming what they saw previously was accurate. Asif Kapadia did a fantastic job in finally humanising him because it’s easy to assume that people born into privilege are fundamentally bad people and John is clearly not that.

Posted By: tim berry, Sep 27, 17:59:12