56 Up7.30pm Sunday, March 17'56 Up' is a unique and fascinating opportunity to see what a life looks like when it is put on fast forward.This is the seventh film in a series made by Grenada Television and directed by Michael Apted. It follows a group of 14 children from a wide spectrum of British society, interviewing them every seven years starting in 1963.In this episode they are now in their 50s and many of them have grandchildren. '56 Up' includes snippets from all seven films so you don't have to have seen the others to appreciate it.The question at the heart of the film seems to be: what makes a child become successful later in life? Is a child from an upper-class background destined to live a happier life than a poorer child from East End, London? The answer seems to be a tentative maybe.By their 50s, all of the film subjects have found some success, or at least happiness, but the middle-class and working-class children definitely seem to have had to struggle and hustle more.The cheeky, naughty boy from a working-class background seems to have all strikes against him. Yet, he grew up to be a successful businessman with a second house in Spain. The chain-smoking, smart-mouthed teenage girl seems destined for some negative fate, but grows up to have a relatively happy life and family, despite some economic hardships. The three little boys from more privileged backgrounds who read theFinancial Times at age seven, predictably grow up to become solicitors and politicians.There are some negatives to the project. One of the things anthropologists struggle against is influencing the culture they are trying to study with their very presence. The idea was to study ordinary children, but the very act of filming them, made them something other than ordinary. It made them into celebrities of a kind and probably altered the course of their lives.One of those filmed became a taxi driver and talked about picking up Edwin (Buzz) Aldrin as a taxi fare. A man approached the taxi and asked for an autograph. When the taxi driver started to hand the paper to the astronaut for his signature, the man said, 'Oh I don't want his autograph, I want yours'. Another film subject talked of receiving negative feedback from society his whole life, because as an innocent seven-year-old, he made racially-charged remarks.There is also the element of exploitation in the early days of the film, which many of the participants remarked on or hinted at in '56 Up'. One woman said she did not want to take part as a child, but her parents made her. She dealt with this by giving the documentarians a hard time as a 14-year-old, and then later dropping out of it for a time. Many people in the film argue that it unfairly portrayed them or took their life out of context.Ironically, in '56 Up' some of the subjects decided to exploit the film for their own gains. One person said he was only taking part because he wanted to promote his music band and another wanted to be a politician and a published writer.Overall, the film is worth watching and is thought-provoking.