British television and film producer Verity Ann Lambert died on 22 November 2007. Born in London on 27 November 1935, she was in charge of the production of the 1963 children’s television series Doctor Who.
Lambert left Roedean public school at 16, spent a year at the Sorbonne in Paris, and then returned to London to take a secretarial course. Her television start was as a secretary to the press officer at Granada Television shortly before it debuted in 1956. She was fired six months later, but was fascinated by the then-new medium of television. She got a job as a shorthand typist at ABC, where she was promoted to secretary and then became a production secretary, eventually working as director Ted Kotcheff’s personal assistant on Armchair Theatre. Lambert went to New York in 1961 as a personal assistant to American producer David Susskind. She returned to ABC as a production assistant and in 1963, after Sydney Newman—the Canadian who had produced Armchair Theatre—left for the BBC as its head of drama, he hired the 27-year-old Lambert as a producer to make a new program for children, making her the only female producer at the BBC.
Newman originally conceived of Doctor Who as an educational program, with none of what he called “cheap-jack, bug-eyed monsters,” but the Time Lord (originally played by William Hartnell) was soon traveling to other planets. The second Doctor Who serial introduced the cheesy-looking Daleks. Lambert and the script editor, David Whitaker, clashed with Newman as they developed the outer-space concept and introduced alien creatures, but they won the battle that saw Doctor Who evolve into what it is today, the world’s longest-running science fiction serial. Lambert eventually produced 78 episodes between 1963 and 1966.
After that start, she produced further genre television programs, including: one episode of Adam Adamanat Lives! (1966), A.D.A.M. (1973), and four episodes of Quartermass (1979). She also moved into film production, with genre entries such as Morons from Outer Space (1985) and Link (1986).
Lambert was a producer at BBC TV from 1963 to 1974, before moving to Thames TV as Controller, Director of Drama, and director. She was the Chief Executive of Euston Films from 1979 to 1983; and the Director of Production at Thorn EMI Screen Entertainment from 1982 to 1985. Then she opened her own studio, Cinema Verity Productions in 1985. In 2002, she was awarded an OBE (Officer of the order of the British Empire) in recognition of her services to film and television. She won the Royal Television Society’s Hall of Fame Award in 1998 and the Bafta Alan Clarke Award for her outstanding contribution to television in 2002.