A documentary by Michael Apted. Rated PG

“This has been a glimpse of Britain’s future.” Those words ended the debut, and subsequent installments, of the U.K. TV series that began when Seven Up! first aired, in 1964. Now that Britain’s future has passed, how do the original participants in the long-running series feel about where they’ve been and where they’re going?

The most salient questions are asked and largely answered in 63 Up, which may be the last installment, at least as envisioned by Michael Apted, who is now 78 and has directed all but that first episode. (He was an assistant there, before handling episodes of Coronation Street and other Granada shows.) The steadfast subjects—10 men and, still shockingly, only four women—have gone through the usual life changes; one has died, one’s gravely ill, and some have uprooted themselves several times.

A few excused themselves from the series, most notably Charles Furneaux, who went on to be a television-doc producer himself. Perhaps he viewed it as a conflict of interest, but the subject never comes up. The saddest saga is that of Nicholas Hitchon, the scientist who moved to the U.S. and started a new family only to be stricken by cancer. (He did work with uranium and other radioactive materials.) But a formerly bleak pattern finds that idealistic Neil Hughes, homeless and adrift in several episodes, has had some success in local politics and is now living part-time on his own farmstead in France.

Upper-class twits, like Bruce Balden and John Brisby, who seemed so priggish at the start, have become rather more giving and social-minded over the years. Paul Kligerman and Symon Basterfield, abandoned at the same orphanage at the start, have built large, happy families for themselves. Only three of the women are on hand this time, with the enterprising Sue Davis and tough-talking Jackie Bassett building solid middle-class lives out of hardscrabble beginnings. (Jackie continues to give Apted a right bollocking for the sexist assumptions on which the series was built.)

If the Uppers have a central theme, it’s that of social mobility in class-bound Blighty. Many subjects complain that their grandchildren may be the first cohort not to do appreciably better than their forebears. Even Tony, the “cheeky chappy” from Hackney who went from jockey to cabbie and then got wiped out in the 2008 debacle, admits, “I usually vote Tory, but I might have to rethink that.” All voice opposition to Brexit, expressing the fatalism that goes with having seen Britain age in reverse—once Great, but now just Little England.