[BITList] An Unearthly Child

[John Feltham]

Any Doctor Who fans out there?




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Lambert,  Verity Ann  (1935-2007), television and film producer, was born on 27 November 1935 at 63 Fitzjohns Avenue, Hampstead, London, the only child of affluent Jewish parents, Stanley Joseph Lambert, a chartered accountant, and his wife, Ella Corona, nee Goldburg. At the time of her birth registration her parents lived at 145 Nether Street, North Finchley, London. She was educated at Roedean School until the age of sixteen, studied at the Sorbonne for a year, and then returned to attend secretarial school in London for eighteen months.

Lambert began work in television as secretary to the press officer at Granada in 1956, then moved to ABC Television, working her way up from shorthand typist to production secretary in the drama department. At this point in her television career she wanted to move away from secretarial roles and into drama production, spending a year working for Talent Associates in New York, primarily as assistant to the producer and talk-show host David Susskind. After her return to the UK, and ABC, she became bored and frustrated by the lack of opportunities for women working in television production until Sydney Newman (the former producer of ABC's Armchair Theatre, who had been poached as head of drama by the BBC) invited her to work as producer on his new series, Doctor Who, in November 1963. At twenty-eight, she became the youngest producer at the BBC and the drama department's only female producer, known for her no-nonsense approach and for refusing to be overawed by more senior contributors. After the overnight success of Doctor Who (which Lambert produced for its first eighteen months) she produced other long-running series for the BBC, including another cult science fiction series, Adam Adamant Lives! (1966-7), and the W. Somerset Maugham series, which won the BAFTA award for the best drama series of 1969.

Lambert left the BBC in 1969 and went on to produce drama for London Weekend Television, initially working on Budgie (1971-2), a vehicle for the pop singer Adam Faith. Around this time she met the camera operator (later director) Colin Michael Bucksey (b. 1946), son of George Edward Bucksey, town hall attendant. They married at Kensington register office on 18 July 1973. After a brief return to the BBC-where she produced Shoulder to Shoulder (1974), a series of plays about the suffragette movement-Lambert moved to Thames Television in 1974 as controller of drama, and oversaw a prodigious period of 'quality drama' for the company: Rock Follies (1976), the musical drama series about an all-female rock group; Bill Brand (1976, Trevor Griffiths's study of a Labour politician); The Naked Civil Servant, starring John Hurt in an award-winning 'biopic' of Quentin Crisp, written by Philip Mackie under Lambert's ITV Playhouse umbrella in 1975; and Rumpole of the Bailey (1978-9). Lambert was also responsible for Thames's subsidiary company, Euston Films, which produced gritty comedies and drama for television, including Minder (1979-85) and Widows (1983), about a group of four women who pull off an armed robbery (its sequel, She's Out, was produced by Lambert's own company, Cinema Verity, in 1995). While she had initially juggled her work as head of drama at Thames with her work at Euston Films, she eventually switched to become the latter's full-time chief executive.

For three years, from 1982, Lambert was the director of productions for Thorn EMI Screen Entertainment, responsible for film series for television and cinema films, with varying success: in 1985 she oversaw Mel Smith and Griff Rhys Jones's Morons from Outer Space, but also Dennis Potter's Alice in Wonderland fantasy Dreamchild. She remained on the board at Thames, as a director (1982-5), and kept her post at Euston Films until 1983. (This period is surely evidence of Lambert's workaholism.) Unhappy at Thorn EMI, she established her own production company, Cinema Verity, in 1985. The company produced a wide range of material including A Cry in the Dark (1988, the 'dingo baby' film starring Meryl Streep), two sitcoms for BBC1, May to December (1989-94) and So Haunt Me (1992-4), and the critically acclaimed drama series GBH (for Channel 4, 1991). She also produced two BBC comedy dramas: Jonathan Creek (from its second series in 1998 to 2004) and Love Soup (2005-8). Cinema Verity's single (expensive) flop was Eldorado (1992-3), a soap opera filmed for the BBC on a purpose-built set in Spain that failed to gain audiences and was cancelled after only a year.

Verity Lambert was a hard-working, pioneering woman in a doggedly masculine industry, a highly successful populist with a prodigious talent for producing stories that gripped the nation and earned wide-reaching critical acclaim. She produced a huge range of drama that had an enormous impact on the British television industry. She was appointed OBE in 2002. She died of breast cancer on 22 November 2007 at the Royal Marsden Hospital, Chelsea, London. Her marriage had ended in divorce in 1987, and she had no children.

Helen Wheatley 

Sources  J. Tulloch and M. Alvarado, Doctor Who: the unfolding text (1983) + M. Alvarado and J. Stewart, Made for television: Euston Films Limited (1985) + R. Dickinson, 'Verity Lambert', Museum of Broadcast Communications encyclopedia of television, ed. H. Newcomb, 3 vols. (1997) + C. Brunsdon, Screen tastes: soap opera to satellite dishes (1997) + L. Cooke, British television drama: a history (2003) + J. Hallam, Lynda La Plante (2005) + The Times (24 Nov 2007) + Daily Telegraph (24 Nov 2007) + The Guardian (26 Nov 2007); (28 Nov 2007) + The Independent (26 Nov 2007) + www.screenonline.org.uk/people/id/550923/index.html,  accessed on 10 May 2010 + WW (2007) + b. cert. + m. cert. + d. cert.
Archives Strathclyde University, Glasgow, papers FILM BFINA, current affairs footage + BFINA, light entertainment footage SOUND BL NSA, documentary recording
Likenesses  M. Seymour, resin print from original negative, 1961, NPG · photographs, 1963-97, PA Photos, London · photographs, 1965-85, Getty Images, London, Hult. Arch. · G. Miller, archival inkjet print, 1984, NPG · A. McGuinness, C-type colour print, 1988, NPG · L. Cendrowicz, photograph, repro. in Independent on Sunday (17 June 2001) · N. Libbert, photograph, repro. in The Observer (26 Aug 1990) · obituary photographs · photograph, BBC [see illus.]
Wealth at death  £2,588,516: probate, 2 Oct 2008, CGPLA Eng. & Wales



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