Verity Lambert

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Lambert was born in London, the daughter of a Jewish accountant, and was educated at Roedean School. She left Roedean at sixteen with 6 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.

Following her dismissal from Granada, Lambert took a job as a shorthand-typist at ABC Weekend TV. She soon became the secretary to the company's Head of Drama and then a production secretary working on a programme called State Your Case. She then moved from administration to production, working on drama programming on ABC's popular anthology series Armchair Theatre and also early episodes of The Avengers, 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. Returning to England, she rejoined ABC with an ambition to direct, but remained a production assistant and found it impossible to gain promotion. She decided that, if she could not find advancement within a year, she would abandon television as a career.

BBC career

In December 1962, Sydney Newman left ABC to take up the position of Head of Drama at BBC Television, and the following year Lambert joined him at the corporation. Newman had recruited her to produce Doctor Who, a programme he had personally initiated. Conceived by Newman as an educational science-fiction serial for early Saturday evenings, the programme concerned the adventures of an old man travelling through space and time in his TARDIS, disguised as a police box. In some quarters, the series was not expected to last longer than thirteen weeks.

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."

When Lambert arrived at the BBC in June 1963, she was initially given a more experienced associate producer, Mervyn Pinfield, to assist her. Doctor Who debuted on 23 November 1963 and quickly became a success for the BBC, chiefly on the popularity of the alien creatures known as Daleks. Lambert's superior, Head of Serials Donald Wilson, had strongly advised against using the script in which the Daleks first appeared, but after the serial's successful airing, he said that Lambert clearly knew the series far better than he did, and he would no longer interfere in her decisions. The success of Doctor Who and the Daleks also garnered press attention for Lambert herself; in 1964, the Daily Mail published a feature on the series focusing on its young producer's looks: "The operation of the Daleks ... is conducted by a remarkably attractive young woman called Verity Lambert who, at 28, is not only the youngest but the only female drama producer at B.B.C. TV ... [T]all, dark and shapely, she became positively forbidding when I suggested that the Daleks might one day take over Dr. Who."

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.

She moved on to produce another BBC show created 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 she 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.

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