Verity Ann Lambert (27 November 1935 – 22 November 2007) was an English television and film producer.

Lambert began working in television in the 1950s. She began her career as a producer at the BBC by becoming the founding producer of the science-fiction series Doctor Who from 1963 until 1965. She left the BBC in 1969 and worked for other television companies, notably having a long association with Thames Television and its Euston Films offshoot in the 1970s and 1980s. Her many credits as producer include Adam Adamant Lives!, The Naked Civil Servant, Rock Follies, Minder, Widows, G.B.H., Jonathan Creek, Love Soup and Eldorado. She also worked in the film industry for Thorn EMI Screen Entertainment. She was an associate of the Beatles manager, Brian Epstein. From 1985 she ran her own production company, Cinema Verity. She continued to work as a producer until the year she died.

Women were rarely television producers in Britain at the beginning of Lambert's career. When she was appointed to Doctor Who in 1963, she was BBC Television's only female drama producer, as well as the youngest. The website of the Museum of Broadcast Communications hails her as "not only one of Britain's leading businesswomen, but possibly the most powerful member of the nation's entertainment industry ... Lambert has served as a symbol of the advances won by women in the media". The British Film Institute's Screenonline website describes Lambert as "one of those producers who can often create a fascinating small screen universe from a slim script and half-a-dozen congenial players."

The University of Strathclyde awarded Lambert an Honorary Doctor of Laws in April 1988. She left Roedean at sixteen with six O-Levels and pursued a six months language course at the University of Paris enrolling at a secretarial college upon returning to London for eighteen months. She later credited her interest in the structural and characterisational aspects of scriptwriting to an inspirational English teacher. Lambert's first job was the typing of menus at the Kensington De Vere Hotel, which employed her because she had been to France and could speak French. In 1956, she entered the television industry as a secretary at Granada Television's press office. She was sacked from this job after six months. both of which were then overseen by the new Head of Drama, Canadian producer Sydney Newman.

Catastrophic incidents could occur on live television of this era. On 28 November 1958, while Lambert was working as a Production Assistant on Armchair Theatre, an actor died during a live broadcast of Underground and she had to take responsibility for directing the cameras from the studio gallery while director Ted Kotcheff worked with the actors on the studio floor to accommodate the loss.

In 1961, Lambert left ABC, spending a year working as the personal assistant to American television producer David Susskind at the independent production company Talent Associates in New York.

Although Lambert was not Newman's first choice to produce the series—Don Taylor and Shaun Sutton had both declined the position—he was very keen to ensure that Lambert took the job after his experience of working with her at ABC. "I think the best thing I ever did on that was to find Verity Lambert," he told Doctor Who Magazine in 1993. "I remembered Verity as being bright and, to use the phrase, full of piss and vinegar! She was gutsy and she used to fight and argue with me, even though she was not at a very high level as a production assistant."

Lambert oversaw the first two seasons of the programme and the first part of the third, eventually leaving in 1965. "There comes a time when a series needs new input," she told Doctor Who Magazine thirty years later. "It's not that I wasn't fond of Doctor Who, I simply felt that the time had come. It had been eighteen very concentrated months, something like seventy shows. I know people do soaps forever now, but I felt Doctor Who needed someone to come in with a different view." 15 episodes produced by Lambert—all episodes of Marco Polo, two episodes of The Reign of Terror, two episodes of The Crusade, three episodes of Galaxy 4 and the standalone Mission to the Unknown—were not retained in the BBC Archives, mainly affecting her first year working on the show.

Other BBC productions

Lambert moved on to produce another BBC show developed by Newman, the swashbuckling action-adventure series Adam Adamant Lives! (1966–67). The long development period of Adam Adamant delayed its production, and during this delay Newman gave her the initial episodes of a new soap opera, The Newcomers, to produce. Further productions for the BBC included a season of the crime drama Detective (1968–69) and a 26-part series of adaptations of the stories of William Somerset Maugham (1969).

In 1969 the comedy series Monty Python's Flying Circus made reference to Lambert in a sketch entitled "Buying a Bed" from the episode "Full Frontal Nudity", which was broadcast on BBC 1 on 7 December 1969. Eric Idle plays a salesman named "Mr Verity" and Graham Chapman plays a salesman named "Mr Lambert".

In 1969 Lambert left the staff of the BBC to join London Weekend Television, where she produced Budgie (1970–72) and Between the Wars (1973). She returned to the BBC on a freelance basis to produce Shoulder to Shoulder (1974), a series of six 75-minute plays about the suffragette movement of the early 20th century. During her time in this position she oversaw several high-profile and successful contributions to the ITV network, including The Naked Civil Servant (1975), Rock Follies (1976–77), Rumpole of the Bailey (1978–92) and Edward and Mrs Simpson (1978).

Television historian Lez Cooke described Lambert's time in control of the drama department at Thames as "an adventurous period for the company, demonstrating that it was not only the BBC that was capable of producing progressive television drama during the 1970s. Lambert wanted Thames to produce drama series 'which were attempting in one way or another to tackle modern problems and life,' an ambition which echoed the philosophy of her mentor Sydney Newman." Howard Schuman, the writer of Rock Follies, also later praised the bravery of Lambert's commissioning. "Verity Lambert had just arrived as head of drama at Thames TV and she went for broke," he told The Observer newspaper in 2002. "She commissioned a serial, Jennie: Lady Randolph Churchill, for safety, but also Bill Brand, one of the edgiest political dramas ever, and us ... Before we had even finished making the first series, Verity commissioned the second."

Lambert's association with Thames and Euston Films continued into the 1980s. In 1982, she rejoined the staff of parent company Thames Television as director of drama, and was given a seat on the company's board.

Her job here was somewhat frustrating as the British film industry was in one of its periodic states of flux, but she did produce several feature films, including Clockwise (1986). Lambert later expressed some regret on her time in the film industry in a feature for The Independent newspaper. "Unfortunately, the person who hired me left, and the person who came in didn't want to produce films and didn't want me. While I managed to make some films I was proud of—Dennis Potter's Dreamchild, and Clockwise with John Cleese—it was terribly tough and not a very happy experience." after she insisted on the cutting of large portions of his first draft script before production began. Bleasdale subsequently admitted that she was right about the majority of the cut material, and when the production was finished, he only missed one small scene from those she had demanded be excised. Launched with a major publicity campaign and running in a high-profile slot three evenings a week on BBC1, the series was critically mauled and lasted only a year, from 1992 to 1993. Lambert's biography at Screenonline suggests some reasons for this failure: "With on-location production facilities and an evident striving for a genuinely contemporary flavour, Lambert's costly Euro soap Eldorado suggested a degree of ambition ... which it seemed in the event ill-equipped to realise, and a potentially interesting subject tailed off into implausible melodrama. Eldorado's plotting ... was disappointingly ponderous. As a result, the expatriate community in southern Spain theme and milieu was exploited rather than explored."

In the early 1990s, Lambert attempted to win the rights to produce Doctor Who independently for the BBC; this effort was unsuccessful because the corporation was already in negotiations with producer Philip Segal in the United States. Cinema Verity projects that did reach production included Sleepers (BBC1, 1991) and The Cazalets (BBC One, 2001), the latter co-produced by actress Joanna Lumley, whose idea it was to adapt the novels by Elizabeth Jane Howard.

Lambert continued to work as a freelance producer outside of her own company. She produced the popular BBC One comedy-drama series Jonathan Creek,

In the 2002 New Year's Honours list Lambert was appointed an Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) for her services to film and television production, and the same year she received BAFTA's Alan Clarke Award for Outstanding Contribution to Television.

In 2007, Lambert was posthumously awarded the Women in Film ‘Working Title Films Lifetime Achievement Award’.

Personal life

In 1973, Lambert married television director Colin Bucksey. They separated in 1984 and divorced in 1987. She had no children, once telling an interviewer, "I can't stand babies—no, I love babies as long as their parents take them away." whose first episode had been overshadowed by the assassination, on 22 November 1963, of President Kennedy. She was due to have been presented with a lifetime achievement award at the Women in Film and Television Awards the following month. She was cremated at Golders Green Crematorium.

Further Information

Lambert donated personal archives, including her OBE, two BAFTA Awards, ‘Fellow of the British Film Institute’ award, photographs, including from various production sets, and her inscribed producer's chair to the Archives of the University of Strathclyde

In the 2007 Doctor Who episode "Human Nature", the Tenth Doctor refers to his parents as "Sydney" and "Verity", a tribute to both Newman and Lambert. She is further honoured in the episode "The End of Time" when the Doctor visits the great-granddaughter of Matron Joan Redfern, the human love interest he gave up to reclaim his Time Lord memories in the episode "Human Nature"; the character is named "Verity Newman". In the 2007 Christmas special "Voyage of the Damned", a dedication to Lambert was shown before the rolling of the end credits.

In April 2008, BBC Four aired an evening-long tribute to Lambert's work at the network, including a documentary and repeats of her most popular programmes. Also that year, the DVD release of The Time Meddler included the last commentary she made before her death, and a short documentary feature, Verity Lambert Obituary, described as "a concise essay looking back over the career of one of Doctor Whos co-creators."

For Doctor Whos fiftieth anniversary in 2013, the BBC commissioned a drama about the creation of the programme, entitled An Adventure in Space and Time. Lambert was played by actress Jessica Raine.

On 23 July 2014, a blue heritage plaque was unveiled by the Doctor Who Appreciation Society and the Riverside Trust, at Riverside Studios in Hammersmith in London. The plaque commemorates Lambert at Riverside and elsewhere. The plaque was unveiled by director Waris Hussein, her longtime friend and colleague, and the unveiling was attended by many friends and associates from over the years. When Riverside Studios was closed for redevelopment later that year, the plaque was placed into storage. In 2022 it was reinstalled on the exterior of the building and unveiled at a ceremony attended by many people from television, including actors Caroline Quentin, Larry Lamb, Carole Ann Ford and Anna Carteret, writer Lynda La Plante, former Doctor Who producers Philip Hinchcliffe and Steven Moffat, Ofcom chair Michael Grade, and former vision mixer Clive Doig.

The main family in the children's book series "The Lambert Histories" by Abiah Patterson are named after Verity Lambert.

Selected filmography

  • Doctor Who (1963–1965), producer
  • Adam Adamant Lives! (1966–1967), producer
  • Detective (1968), producer
  • Take Three Girls (1969), producer
  • W. Somerset Maugham (1969–1970), producer
  • Budgie (1971), producer
  • The Knowledge (1979), executive producer
  • A Performance of Macbeth (1979), executive producer
  • Fox: King Billy (1980), executive producer
  • The Flame Trees of Thika (1981), executive producer
  • Saigon: Year of the Cat (1983), producer
  • The Nation's Health (1983), executive producer
  • Reilly: Ace of Spies (1983), executive producer
  • Widows (1983), executive producer
  • Minder (1979–1984), executive producer
  • Slayground (1983) (head of production)
  • Morons from Outer Space (1985), executive producer
  • Clockwise (1986), executive producer
  • Link (1986), executive producer
  • Evil Angels (A Cry in the Dark) (1988), producer
  • American Roulette (1988), executive producer
  • Coasting (1990), producer
  • G.B.H. (1991), executive producer
  • Sleepers (1991), executive producer
  • Boys from the Bush (1991), producer
  • So Haunt Me (1992)
  • Eldorado (1992), producer
  • Comics (1993), producer
  • Class Act (1994), producer
  • Heavy Weather (1995), producer
  • Temp (1995), producer
  • She's Out (1995), producer
  • A Perfect State (1997), executive producer
  • Jonathan Creek (1998–2004), producer
  • The Cazalets (2001), producer
  • Love Soup (2005–2007), producer
  • Doctor Who: A Happy Ending (2006), script editor

References

  • Video interview at the BBC.co.uk Jonathan Creek site (requires RealPlayer)
  • Encyclopedia of Fantastic Film and Television entry
  • Verity Lambert Archive Interview at the Doctor Who Appreciation Society