{"version":1,"type":"rich","provider_name":"Libsyn","provider_url":"https:\/\/www.libsyn.com","height":90,"width":600,"title":"TDP 35: Pre Christmas Show Tribute to Verity Lambert","description":"Verity Ann Lambert, OBE (27 November 1935 \u2013 22 November 2007) was an English television and film producer. She is best known as the founding producer of the science-fiction series Doctor Who, a programme which has become a part of British popular culture.\r\n\r\n\r\nLambert was a pioneer woman in British television; when she was appointed to Doctor Who in 1963 she was the youngest producer, and only female drama producer, working at the BBC.[1]\r\n\r\n\r\nLambert began working in television in the 1950s, and continued to\r\nwork as a producer up until the year she died. After leaving the BBC in\r\n1969, she worked for other television companies, notably Thames Television and Euston Films in the 1970s and 80s. She also worked in the film industry, for Thorn EMI Screen Entertainment, and from 1985 ran her own production company, Cinema Verity. In addition to Doctor Who, she produced Adam Adamant Lives!, The Naked Civil Servant, Rock Follies, Minder, Widows, G.B.H., Jonathan Creek and Love Soup.\r\n\r\n\r\nThe British Film Institute's Screenonline\r\nwebsite describes Lambert as "one of those producers who can often\r\ncreate a fascinating small screen universe from a slim script and\r\nhalf-a-dozen congenial players."[2] The website of the Museum of Broadcast Communications\r\nhails her as "not only one of Britain's leading businesswomen, but\r\npossibly the most powerful member of the nation's entertainment\r\nindustry ... Lambert has served as a symbol of the advances won by\r\nwomen in the media"[3]. News of her death came on the 44th anniversary of the first showing of Doctor Who.\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\nContents\r\n [hide]\r\n1 Early career in independent television2 BBC career3 Thames Television and Euston Films4 Cinema Verity5 References6 External links\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\/\/<![CDATA[\r\n if (window.showTocToggle) { var tocShowText = "show"; var tocHideText = "hide"; showTocToggle(); } \r\n\/\/]]>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n[edit] Early career in independent television\r\nLambert was born in London, the daughter of a Jewish accountant, and educated at Roedean School.[4] She left Roedean at sixteen and studied at the Sorbonne in Paris for a year, and at a secretarial college in London for eighteen months.[5]\r\nShe later credited her interest in the structural and\r\ncharacterisational aspects of scriptwriting to an inspirational English\r\nteacher.[6] Lambert's first job was typing menus at the Kensington De Vere Hotel, which employed her because she had been to France and could speak French.[5] 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.[5]\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\nABC Television's studios at Didsbury in Manchester, where Lambert worked in the late 1950s.\r\n\r\n\r\nFollowing her dismissal from Granada, Lambert took a job as a shorthand typist at ABC Television.[5] 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.[5] She then moved from administration to production, working on drama programming on ABC's popular anthology series Armchair Theatre. Armchair Theatre was overseen at the time by the company's new Head of Drama, Canadian producer Sydney Newman.\r\n\r\n\r\nOn 28 November 1958, while Lambert was working as a production assistant on Armchair Theatre, actor Gareth Jones died off-screen just prior to a scene in which he was to appear during a live television broadcast of the hour-long play "Underground". Lambert had to take control of directing the cameras from the studio gallery as director William Kotcheff hastily worked with the actors during a commercial break to accommodate the loss.[7]\r\n\r\n\r\nIn 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.[5]\r\nReturning to England, she rejoined ABC with an ambition to direct, but\r\ngot stuck as a production assistant, and decided that if she could not\r\nfind advancement within a year she would abandon television as a career.[5]\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n[edit] BBC career\r\nIn 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,\r\na programme he had personally initiated. Conceived by Newman as an\r\neducational science-fiction series for children, the programme\r\nconcerned the adventures of a crotchety old man travelling through\r\nspace and time with his sometimes unwilling companions in a machine larger on the inside than the out. The show was a risk, and in some quarters not expected to last longer than thirteen weeks.[8]\r\n\r\n\r\nAlthough Lambert was not Newman's first choice to produce the series \u2014 Don Taylor[9] and Shaun Sutton[10]\r\nhad both declined the position \u2014 the Canadian was very keen to ensure\r\nthat Lambert took the job after his experience of working with her at\r\nABC. "I think the best thing I ever did on that was to find Verity\r\nLambert," he told Doctor Who Magazine\r\nin 1993. "I remembered Verity as being bright and, to use the phrase,\r\nfull of piss and vinegar! She was gutsy and she used to fight and argue\r\nwith me, even though she was not at a very high level as a production\r\nassistant."[9]\r\n\r\n\r\nWhen 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,\r\nhad strongly advised against using the script in which the Daleks first\r\nappeared, but after the serial's successful airing, he said that\r\nLambert clearly knew the series far better than he did, and he would no\r\nlonger interfere in her decisions. The success of Doctor Who and the Daleks also garnered press attention for Lambert herself; in 1964, the Daily Mail\r\npublished a feature on the series focusing on the perceived\r\nattractiveness of its young producer: "The operation of the Daleks ...\r\nis conducted by a remarkably attractive young woman called Verity\r\nLambert who, at 28, is not only the youngest but the only female drama\r\nproducer at B.B.C. TV... [T]all, dark and shapely, she became\r\npositively forbidding when I suggested that the Daleks might one day\r\ntake over Dr. Who."[11]\r\n\r\n\r\nLambert oversaw the first two seasons of the programme, eventually\r\nleaving in 1965. "There comes a time when a series need new input," she\r\ntold Doctor Who Magazine thirty years later. "It's not that I wasn't fond of Doctor Who,\r\nI simply felt that the time had come. It had been eighteen very\r\nconcentrated months, something like seventy shows. I know people do\r\nsoaps forever now, but I felt Doctor Who needed someone to come in with a different view."[12]\r\n\r\n\r\nIn the 2007 Doctor Who episode "Human Nature", the Doctor (as John Smith) refers to his parents as Sydney and Verity, a tribute to both Newman and Lambert.[13]\r\n\r\n\r\nShe moved on to produce another BBC show created by Newman, the swashbuckling action-adventure series Adam Adamant Lives! (1966\u201367). 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.[14] Further productions for the BBC included a season of the crime drama Detective (1968\u201369) and a twenty-six-part series of adaptations of the stories of William Somerset Maugham (1969). During this period, Lambert was obscurely referenced in Monty Python\u2019s 1969 sketch "Buying a Bed," which featured two shop assistants called Mr. Verity and Mr. Lambert, named after her.[15]\r\n\r\n\r\nIn 1969 she left the staff of the BBC to join London Weekend Television, where she produced Budgie (1970\u201372) and Between the Wars (1973). In 1974, she returned to the BBC on a freelance basis to produce Shoulder to Shoulder, a series of six 75-minute plays about the suffragette movement of the early 20th century.\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n[edit] Thames Television and Euston Films\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\nTeddington Studios in London, where several Thames Television dramas overseen by Lambert, such as Rock Follies, were produced in the 1970s.\r\n\r\n\r\nLater in 1974 Lambert became Head of Drama at Thames Television,\r\na successor company of her former employers ABC. During her time in\r\nthis position she oversaw several high-profile and successful\r\ncontributions to the ITV network, including The Naked Civil Servant (1975), Rock Follies (1976\u201377), Rumpole of the Bailey (1978\u201392) and Edward and Mrs Simpson (1978). In 1976 she was also made responsible for overseeing the work of Euston Films, Thames' subsidiary film production company, at the time best known as the producers of The Sweeney. In 1979 she transferred to Euston full-time as the company's Chief Executive, overseeing productions such as Quatermass (1979), Minder (1979\u201394) and Widows (1983).\r\n\r\n\r\nAt Thames and Euston, Lambert enjoyed the most sustained period of critical and popular success of her career. The Naked Civil Servant won a British Academy Television Award (BAFTA) for its star John Hurt as well as a Broadcasting Press Guild Award and a prize at the Prix Italia;[16] Rock Follies won a BAFTA and a Royal Television Society Award,[17] while Widows\r\nalso gained BAFTA nominations and ratings of over 12 million \u2014\r\nunusually for a drama serial, it picked up viewers over the course of\r\nits six-week run.[7] Minder\r\nwent on to become the longest-running series produced by Euston Films,\r\nsurviving for over a decade following Lambert's departure from the\r\ncompany.[18]\r\n\r\n\r\nTelevision historian Lez Cooke described Lambert's time in control\r\nof the drama department at Thames as "an adventurous period for the\r\ncompany, demonstrating that it was not only the BBC that was capable of\r\nproducing progressive television drama during the 1970s. Lambert wanted\r\nThames to produce drama series 'which were attempting in one way or\r\nanother to tackle modern problems and life,' an ambition which echoed\r\nthe philosophy of her mentor Sydney Newman."[7] Howard Schuman, the writer of Rock Follies,\r\nalso later praised the bravery of Lambert's commissioning. "Verity\r\nLambert had just arrived as head of drama at Thames TV and she went for\r\nbroke," he told The Observer newspaper in 2002. "She commissioned a serial, Jennie: Lady Randolph Churchill, for safety, but also Bill Brand,\r\none of the edgiest political dramas ever, and us... Before we had even\r\nfinished making the first series, Verity commissioned the second."[19]\r\n\r\n\r\nLambert's association with Thames and Euston Films continued into\r\nthe 1980s. In 1982, she rejoined the staff of parent company Thames\r\nTelevision as Director of Drama, and was given a seat on the company's board.\r\nIn November 1982 she left Thames, but remained as Chief Executive at\r\nEuston until November of the following year, to take up her first post\r\nin the film industry, as Director of Production for Thorn EMI Screen Entertainment.\r\nHer job here was somewhat frustrating as the British film industry was\r\nin one of its periodic states of flux, but she did manage to produce\r\nsome noteworthy features, including the 1986 John Cleese film Clockwise.\r\n\r\n\r\nLambert later expressed some regret on her time in the film industry in a feature for The Independent\r\nnewspaper. "Unfortunately, the person who hired me left, and the person\r\nwho came in didn't want to produce films and didn't want me. While I\r\nmanaged to make some films I was proud of \u2014 Dennis Potter's Dreamchild, and Clockwise with John Cleese \u2014 it was terribly tough and not a very happy experience."[5]\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n[edit] Cinema Verity\r\nIn late 1985 Lambert left Thorn EMI, frustrated at the lack of\r\nsuccess and at restructuring measures being undertaken by the company.\r\nShe established her own independent production company, Cinema Verity. The company's first production was the 1988 feature film A Cry in the Dark, starring Sam Neill and Meryl Streep and based on the "dingo baby" case in Australia. Cinema Verity's first television series, the BBC1 sitcom May to December, debuted in 1989 and ran until 1994. The company also produced another successful BBC1 sitcom, So Haunt Me, which ran from 1992 to 1994.\r\n\r\n\r\nLambert executive produced Alan Bleasdale's hard-hitting drama serial G.B.H. for Channel 4 in 1991, winning critical acclaim and several awards.[20]\r\nLambert's relationship with Bleasdale was not entirely smooth, however\r\n\u2014 the writer has admitted in subsequent interviews that he "wanted to\r\nkill Verity Lambert"[21]\r\nafter she insisted on the cutting of large portions of his first draft\r\nscript before production began. However, Bleasdale subsequently\r\nadmitted that she was right about the majority of the cut material, and\r\nwhen the production was finished he only missed one small scene from\r\nthose she had demanded be excised.[21]\r\n\r\n\r\nA less successful Cinema Verity production, and the most noted mis-step of Lambert's career, was the soap opera Eldorado, a co-production with the BBC set in a British expatriate community in Spain. At the time it was the most expensive commission the BBC had given out to an independent production company.[22]\r\nLaunched with a major publicity campaign and running in a high-profile\r\nslot three nights a week on BBC1, the series was critically mauled and\r\nlasted only a year, from 1992 to 1993. Lambert's biography at Screenonline\r\nsuggests some reasons for this failure: "With on-location production\r\nfacilities and an evident striving for a genuinely contemporary\r\nflavour, Lambert's costly Euro soap Eldorado suggested a degree\r\nof ambition ... which it seemed in the event ill-equipped to realise,\r\nand a potentially interesting subject tailed off into implausible\r\nmelodrama. Eldorado's plotting ... was disappointingly\r\nponderous. As a result, the expatriate community in southern Spain\r\ntheme and milieu was exploited rather than explored."[2]\r\nOther reviewers, even the best part of a decade after the programme's\r\ncancellation, were much harsher, with Rupert Smith's comments in The Guardian in 2002 being a typical example. "A \u00a310 million farce that left the BBC with egg all over its entire body and put an awful lot Equity members back on the dole... it will always be remembered as the most expensive flop of all time."[23]\r\n\r\n\r\nIn the early 1990s, Lambert attempted to win the rights to produce Doctor Who\r\nindependently for the BBC; however, this effort was unsuccessful\r\nbecause 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.\r\n\r\n\r\nLambert continued to work as a freelance producer outside of her own\r\ncompany. She produced the popular BBC One comedy-drama series Jonathan Creek, by writer David Renwick,\r\never since taking over the role for its second series in 1998. From\r\nthen until 2004 she produced eighteen episodes of the programme across\r\nfour short seasons, plus two Christmas Specials. She and Renwick also\r\ncollaborated on another comedy-drama, Love Soup, starring Tamsin Greig and transmitted on BBC One in the autumn of 2005.\r\n\r\n\r\nIn 1973, Lambert married television director Colin Bucksey (a man\r\nten years her junior), but the marriage collapsed in 1984, and they\r\ndivorced in 1987.[24][4][25]\r\nShe had no children, once telling an interviewer, "I can't stand babies\r\n\u2014 no, I love babies as long as their parents take them away."[3] In 2000 two of her productions, Doctor Who and The Naked Civil Servant, finished third and fourth respectively in a British Film Institute poll of the 100 Greatest British Television Programmes of the 20th century.[26]\r\n\r\n\r\nIn 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,[27] and the same year she received BAFTA's Alan Clarke Award for Outstanding Contribution to Television.[28] She died of cancer five days before her 72nd birthday.[29]\r\nShe was due to have been presented with a lifetime achievement award at\r\nthe Women in Film and Television Awards the following month.[30]\r\n\r\n","author_name":"Doctor Who: Tin Dog Podcast","author_url":"http:\/\/tin-dog.co.uk","html":"