Paul Almond: Film and television director who made more than 120 TV dramas but was best-known for co-creating ‘Seven Up!’

Paul Almond was the co-creator of Seven Up!, the groundbreaking and long-running documentary series which has followed 14 children through their lives from seven years old towards teenage, adulthood and middle age. The first episode was broadcast in 1964, beginning a series of seven-yearly snapshots.

The most recent instalment, 56 Up!, was shown in 2012 and the project continues to fascinate and delight. “There’s absolutely no question that it was revolutionary,” the documentary film-maker Roger Graef noted. “It was the first reality television programme in some ways.”

Almond was born in 1931 in Shigawake, a small village in the Gaspé region of Quebec. He attended Bishop’s College School and McGill University, Montreal. When he was 18 he crossed America in an MG Roadster to visit his hero, the novelist Christopher Isherwood, in California. The encounter is recorded in Isherwood’s memoir Lost Years: “Paul was blond and apple-cheeked and tall, an all-Canadian boy who played championship ice hockey and belonged to a rich family.” Shortly after, he left to study philosophy, politics and economics at Oxford, where he became president of the poetry society and editor of Isis, the university magazine.

He began working for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (including directing Sean Connery in a 1961 production of Macbeth); then back in the UK, Seven Up! was conceived during a pub discussion between Almond and the maverick Australian journalist and producer, Tim Hewat, creator of World in Action for Granada. The pair, both outsiders from the Commonwealth looking in, wanted to examine the impact of class on British children’s aspirations. Hewat had in mind the Jesuit idiom, “Give me a child until he is seven and I will give you the man” and thought it might provide a motif for the programme.

Almond hired a young researcher, Michael Apted, just out of Cambridge, to go in search of suitable seven-year-olds for the programme. The 14 subjects, 10 boys and four girls were chosen to reflect a variety of backgrounds (Apted later regretted the imbalance). “We brought these children together,” the narrator Douglas Keay intones in the programme’s introduction, “because we wanted a glimpse of England in the year 2000. The shop steward and the executive of the year 2000 are now seven years old.” Hewat later observed: “It was fascinating, and appalling, the way class seemed to stamp someone’s life from very early on.”

Although it was originally intended as a one-off, Apted has since returned to the subject every seven years, directing 7 Plus Seven (1970), and all subsequent episodes. When 42 Up! aired in 1998 he told The Independent: “What I had seen as a significant statement about the English class system was in fact a humanistic document about the real issues of life, about growing up, about coming to terms with failure, success, disappointment, about all the things that everybody can relate to.”

Leaving Seven Up! in Apted’s hands, Almond wrote, produced and directed Isabel (1968), a psychological drama about a woman who returns to her home in a Canadian coastal town and sees phantoms of her past. The film confronted difficult topics, including sexual abuse, incest and mental illness, and received mixed reviews in a then deeply conservative country but won four Canadian film awards. “Everyone had a wonderful time shooting Isabel, although the house is full of ghosts and no one would go in at night,” Almond recalled. “It was pretty scary at times.”

His then wife, the actress Geneviève Bujold, provided a deeply moving performance as Isabel and starred in the two other films of the trilogy, The Act of the Heart (1970) and Journey (1972). Isabel has since been credited for its influence on other Canadian film-makers such as Atom Egoyan and David Cronenberg. In all, Almond produced and directed more than 120 television dramas for Canadian and British networks including CBC, ABC, BBC, and Granada.

In later life Almond turned towards writing. His first novel, La Vengeance des Dieux (The Vengeance of the Gods, 1999), grew out of a screenplay he had been drafting with Hollywood in mind about an asteroid heading for earth. Although a native English speaker, he decided to write it in French, in tribute to his Québécois origins.

He followed up science fiction with autobiography, publishing (also in 1999) a series of letters exchanged with his friend Michael Ballantyne during his time at Oxford. His eight-volume Alford Saga chronicled 200 years of Canadian history, seen through the lives of a settler and his descendants, and is based largely on his own family story.

Almond’s collection of awards includes 12 Genies (Canadian Academy awards) and a Golden Globe nomination for Best Foreign Picture. In 2001 he was appointed Officer of the Order of Canada. In recent years he had divided his time between his ancestral home in Quebec and Malibu in California.

MARCUS WILLIAMSON

Paul Almond, director, producer and writer: born Shigawake, Quebec 26 April 1931; married firstly Angela Leigh (marriage dissolved), secondly Geneviève Bujold (marriage dissolved; one son), thirdly Joan Harwood Elkins; died Malibu, California 10 April 2015.