JASON GUMP: Cambridge professor made impossible claim he was on Seven Up.
Now footage of a talk Prof [Jason] Arday gave in October 2022 has re-emerged, revealing his claim that he appeared as a child on Seven Up.
He told the University of Bath’s Race Equality Taskforce: “I was part of a programme, actually, which – it doesn’t really exist any more – but it was called Seven Up at the time.
“And Seven Up is basically when they follow you over the duration of your life, so they follow you at [ages] 7, 14, 21. I was pulled out of the project when I was 14.”
During the same talk, he also claimed: “I had just turned 18 when I learnt to read and write.”
Seven Up was the first episode in a decades-long TV series created by Granada Productions for ITV.
The series follows 14 people’s lives at seven-year intervals, beginning when they were seven years of age. The final instalment is expected to be broadcast later this year.
The inaugural episode was broadcast in 1964, meaning its subjects were born in 1957. Subsequent programmes have been titled 21 Up, 28 Up and so on as the participants have grown older.
The BBC also commissioned a spin-off series titled Up: Millennium Generation. This began in 2000, also featuring a group of seven-year-olds. At the time, Prof Arday would have been 15.
A BBC spokesman confirmed that Prof Arday was not involved with the Up: Millennium Generation films.
Like Forrest Gump, or his prototype, Woody Allen’s earlier Leonard Zelig character, Arday has made claims of being seemingly everywhere, apparently not considering that he’d eventually be caught, or that he’d be too entrenched in academia for anything to happen to him if he was. And he may be right — over to you, Cambridge: Cambridge Can — but Evidently Won’t — Catch Jason Arday.
A source close to Mr. Driscoll adds that in 2011 at the Freakanomics blog, Fred Shapiro wrote:
The Yale Book of Quotations traces the proverb “It takes a village to raise a child” back to 1989. Subsequent to the publication of the YBQ, I found that Toni Morrison was quoted in Essence, July 1981: “I don’t think one parent can raise a child. I don’t think two parents can raise a child. You really need the whole village.” The forthcoming Yale Book of Modern Proverbs notes: “The saying is often referred to as an ‘African’ or a ‘West African’ proverb; however, no prototype from Africa has been discovered — though several sayings from that continent do urge cooperation in child rearing and other enterprises.”
Regarding Hillary Clinton’s 1995 book popularizing the quote, a source close to the late P.J. O’Rourke famously wrote that the title is “an ancient African proverb which seems to have its origins in the ancient African kingdom of Hallmarkcardia.”
