Did Jason Arday Star in Britain's Top TV Documentary?

A video shows him claiming to have been in the legendary series "Seven Up!" that has followed 14 people since 1964, 21 years before his birth.

Similarly, here’s an obscure video of Jason Arday claiming at 5:20 to have been in a “programme” called Seven Up! when was seven and perhaps again when he was 14:

Seven Up! is perhaps the most famous documentary series in the history of British television. It has followed the same 14 individuals born around 1957 every seven years since 1964, with a tenth episode expected. The last eight episodes were directed by the late Michael Apted, who went on to a distinguished career directing feature films like Coal Miner’s Daughter.

So, saying you were in a program called Seven Up! is the British equivalent of saying Shelby Foote and you were the breakout stars of Ken Burns’ The Civil War.

However … Jason Arday was born in 1985, so he was not one of the generation-older Seven Up! kids, whose names are far from unknown:

What else could rationalize Arday’s claim?

There were some new generation British knockoffs of the documentary series featuring children born in the 1990s, but Arday was too old to be on them. There was also a program called Age Seven in America that Arday might have been the right age for … if he were in America, which he has never claimed to be.

Maybe he’s using “programme” to not mean a TV program but some social work or social science program?

That would be like an elderly American saying he was in a program called I Love Lucy featuring his red-headed mom’s wacky adventures … and then, if ever challenged, explaining he meant a Mommy and Me program at the local community center, and while his mom’s name wasn’t Lucy his mother’s senile grandmother used to get her confused with another girl named Lucy, and she once dyed her hair red, but nobody remembers it because she had her hair dyed back the next day. And are you saying he didn’t love his mother?

But nobody seems to have ever challenged Arday’s fantasies until after he’d been made a full professor at Cambridge.

Now, though … even Britain’s center-left media is today concluding that Arday’s story is hopeless. But what does that say about Britain’s institutions, such as the University of Cambridge?

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