Frank63

Verity Lambert the original producer of Dr Who and many other top BBC programes has passed away aged 71.

Sad, she was about to recieve a filetime achivement award from Working Title films next month.

She'll be greatly missed I'm sure

batman

RIP Verity. Thanks for many hours of entertainment.

Bats.

Fellwanderer

Thank you, Verity.

RIP

All the best
FELL

A signature is no substitute for a life

smudge

A very nice lady who had a brilliant career at a time when it really was a challenge for women to get into the world of television.

Respect.

Smudge

Welcome to my house. Enter freely, and of your own will...

julian_craster

From The Times
November 24, 2007

Obituary: Verity Lambert
TV drama producer who made her name with Doctor Who and went on to make numerous hit crime series and sitcoms

When Sydney Newman, the effervescent head of drama at the BBC during the 1960s, was looking for a producer to launch a new sciencefiction series to air on Saturday evening after Grandstand, he remembered a bright, young production assistant from his previous job at ABC Television. He called her and offered her the job.
Verity Lambert was 27, and Doctor Who was her first job as a drama producer. But Newman's hunch paid off. She proved to be tough and capable, not afraid to tell writers to go back to the typewriter and try again, refusing to be overawed by more experienced actors and technicians and determined to be taken seriously in an industry where women executives were still a rarity.
Although Newman had conceived Doctor Who as believable, even educational, science fiction rather than dominated by “bug-eyed monsters”, he accepted the Daleks with equanimity and saw the series, under Lambert's skilled guidance, grow and flourish, attracting an audience from a far wider age range than the older children for whom it was originally intended.
For Lambert it was the launch pad for a career which took her from the BBC to Thames Television and her own production company. She made her name for drama that was popular, intelligent, and extraordinarily varied, her credits embracing costume drama, crime series, contemporary drama and situation comedy. Occasional flops such as the BBC soap opera Eldorado were more than outweighed by Minder, The Naked Civil Servant and GBH.
The common factor was Lambert's tenacity and drive. A small, energetic woman, she kept up a ferocious schedule and refused to accept the conventional wisdom. Although not a writer she had an instinctive grasp of whether scripts worked and she also had a strong business sense. She was renowned for having a short fuse, and Jeremy Isaacs, her boss at Thames Television, once remarked that she could reduce grown men to tears.
Verity Ann Lambert was born in 1935 into an affluent Jewish family in North London, the daughter of an accountant father and a mother who thought it was not respectable for women to work in television. She was educated at Roedean, but left at 16 as not being “university material”. Even so she had a year at the Sorbonne before taking a secretarial course in London.
She did various typing jobs and became a secretary at Granada Television. Fired after six months, she joined another ITV company, ABC, as a shorthand typist, and went on to become secretary to the drama producer, Dennis Vance. Promoted to production assistant, she joined Armchair Theatre under Sydney Newman.
Most drama was then transmitted live, and in 1958 Lambert found herself experiencing the hazards at first hand. She was in the control room when a leading actor had a heart attack and died on set in the middle of a production. During the commercial break, the director moved swiftly to redistribute the man's lines among the other cast members, leaving Lambert to run the production. Viewers were left none the wiser.
After working in the United States for the independent producer David Susskind, Lambert moved to the BBC in 1963. Remembering her from ABC days, Newman brought her in to launch Doctor Who. She was not only one of the youngest producers in the drama department but the only woman. She cast William Hartnell as the Doctor after seeing him in Lindsay Anderson's film, This Sporting Life.
In 1966 she moved from Doctor Who to a soap opera, The Newcomers, having been given just five weeks to get it on air. Another series she launched was Adam Adamant Lives!, which starred Gerald Harper as an Edwardian adventurer fighting crime in swinging London. Detective, an anthology of crime stories, was followed by a series of Somerset Maugham short stories for which she won a Bafta award in 1969. But when the BBC decided there was no new work for her she left to join London Weekend, where she launched Budgie, a starring vehicle for the pop singer Adam Faith. She returned briefly to the BBC, where with the actress Georgia Brown and Midge Mackenzie she created and produced Shoulder to Shoulder, a series of six programmes dramatising the lives of prominent suffragettes.
In 1974 she joined Thames Television as Controller of Drama and oversaw a particularly distinguished period. Among the productions were: Howard Schuman's Rock Follies, about a female singing group; Bill Brand, Trevor Griffiths's study of a Labour politician; the historical drama Edward and Mrs Simpson; The Naked Civil Servant with John Hurt as the flamboyant homosexual Quentin Crisp; and Rumpole of the Bailey.
Rumpole had started as a BBC Play for Today but the corporation did not see it as a series, and the producer, Irene Shubik, offered it to Thames. Lambert was happy to take it on, but after producing the first series Shubik left, claiming that Lambert had reneged on promises made to her about her fee. Shubik reflected bitterly that she should have secured the rights before approaching Thames.
Lambert was also responsible for Thames's subsidiary Euston Films which, under her guidance, developed a new Quatermass story from Nigel Kneale, The Flame Trees of Thika and Reilly: Ace of Spies. Lambert became personally involved in another Euston project, Minder, nursing it through a sticky start to cult success. She named her dog, a great dane, after Arthur Daley, the dodgy entrepreneur played by George Cole.
She put Lynda La Plante on the writing map with Widows, about four women who pull off an armed robbery and get away with it, and later produced its sequel, She's Out. Euston's single films included The Knowledge, Jack Rosenthal's comedy about London taxi drivers.
In 1982 Lambert moved into the cinema, as director of productions at Thorn EMI. Morons from Outer Space was a limp time-travel spoof, but she went on to more distinguished fare, such as Dreamchild, from a Dennis Potter script about the model for Lewis Carroll's Alice, and Clockwise, a Michael Frayn comedy starring John Cleese as a manic headmaster.
But it was an unhappy time and in 1985 Lambert decided to form her own production company, Cinema Verity. Her range of material was impressively wide and included the 1988 feature film, A Cry in the Dark, with Meryl Streep as Lindy Chamberlain, accused of murdering her daughter. But her main outlet was television and she served all the main channels. There was Class Act, with Joanna Lumley, and a first stab at situation comedy with May to December, a generation-gap romance which ran for six series, and So Haunt Me, with Miriam Karlin as a kindly ghost.
The Boys from the Bush was a comedy-drama shot mostly in Australia, while Alan Bleasdale's GBH, screened by Channel 4, echoed the turbulent city politics of Liverpool with Robert Lindsay as a politician widely seen as being modelled on the militant left-winger, Derek Hatton. Lambert oversaw three series of the comedy whodunnit, Jonathan Creek, and in 2001 launched The Cazalets, based on novels by Elizabeth Jane Howard, with Joanna Lumley as co-producer.
Eldorado was launched in 1992 as an early-evening soap opera about British, French and Danish expatriates in Spain. At the time it was the biggest series that the BBC had entrusted to an independent producer and was worth £10 million to Cinema Verity. The show got off to a tepid start, was ridiculed by the critics and was eventually watched by fewer people than Gardeners' World.
After a year Alan Yentob, the new Controller of BBC1, put it out of its misery. Lambert said it had been rushed out too quickly, and been miscast, for which she took full blame. But helped by the fact that few viewers pay attention to production credits, she managed to extricate herself from the debacle and move on.
Her latest project was Love Soup (2005), a romantic comedy for the BBC written by David Renwick of Jonathan Creek and starring Tamsin Greig. A second series is in the pipeline.
Lambert served as a governor of the British Film Institute and of the National Film and Television School and was honoured by her peers with the Alan Clarke Award at Bafta in 2002. She was appointed OBE in the same year.
Her marriage to Colin Bucksey, a film director ten years her junior, was dissolved in 1987. There were no children.
Verity Lambert, OBE, television drama producer, was born on November 27, 1935. She died after a long illness on November 22, 2007, aged 71

julian_craster

Verity Lambert
Daily Telegraph
24/11/2007

Verity Lambert, the television and film producer who died on Thursday aged 71, launched the original series of Doctor Who.


Verity Lambert: she once had to take over as studio director during a live broadcast when an actor died

Dogged, chain-smoking and flamboyant, Lambert was also a pioneering woman in British television. At the age of 28, she became the youngest producer at the BBC and the drama department's only woman producer when Doctor Who began the day after President Kennedy was assassinated in November 1963.
With a self-proclaimed ability to reduce strong men to tears, Lambert commanded a mixture of respect and fear, and confessed to operating on a short fuse. But she was modest about her success. "For any woman there has to be luck," she told one journalist at the height of her career, "and after that there is what you do with it."
After leaving the BBC in 1969 - following a nervous breakdown - she spent the 1970s and 1980s with Thames Television and Euston Films and since 1985 had run her own production company, Cinema Verity. Among her television production credits were some of the most popular successes of the last few decades, including The Naked Civil Servant, Minder, Widows and Jonathan Creek.
The concept of Doctor Who belonged to Lambert's boss, the Canadian producer Sydney Newman, and although she was not his first choice to produce the series, he was anxious to recruit his "very bright" protégée because - as he recalled - she was gutsy and "full of piss and vinegar".

Despite being launched at a moment of global anguish, Doctor Who rapidly became a hit, not least because of the popularity of the Daleks. Such was the cachet accruing to Lambert that in 1964 one newspaper ran a feature in praise of this "remarkably attractive young woman... Tall, dark and shapely, she became positively forbidding when I suggested that the Daleks might one day take over Doctor Who."
A lifelong populist, Lambert's single flop was her expensive "Eurosoap" Eldorado (1992-93). Although lavishly equipped with on-location production facilities and despite striving for a genuinely contemporary flavour, the series failed to appeal, and it was pulled after a year. One critic scorned it as "a £10 million farce that left the BBC with egg all over its entire body and put an awful lot of Equity members back on the dole... it will always be remembered as the most expensive flop of all time."
Verity Ann Lambert was born on November 27 1935, the only child of a Jewish accountant, and educated at Roedean, where she frightened herself watching Great Expectations on the school projector. After a year at the Sorbonne, her first job was typing menus at a hotel in Kensington which took her on because she had been to France and could speak French.
In 1956 she landed her first job in television, as a £7-a-week secretary in Granada's press office. Sacked after six months, she moved to ABC Television where she became production assistant to the drama director Ted Kotcheff and worked on the production of the Armchair Theatre series, overseen by the company's new head of drama, Sydney Newman.
As production assistant in a "live" gallery, Lambert had to take over as studio director in November 1958 when one of the actors died on the set of the play Underground, just before a scene in which he was supposed to appear. Meanwhile Kotcheff used a commercial break to reorganise the cast and cover the loss.
In 1961 Lambert went to the United States, and worked in New York as personal assistant to the American producer David Susskind. On her return to London, she again worked as a production assistant in ABC's drama department under Newman, promising herself that unless she was promoted within a year she would give up television and do something else.
When Newman moved to be head of drama at the BBC in 1963 he invited her to apply for the position of producer on a new children's science fiction series, Doctor Who. After 18 months Lambert moved on to produce the first eight episodes of the twice-weekly serial The Newcomers (1965-69), about a London family adapting to life in a small East Anglian town, and then supervised production on Adam Adamant Lives! (1966-67).
Later she produced 26 episodes in a collection of stories dramatised from the works of W Somerset Maugham; the series received the Society of Film and Television Arts award for the best drama series of 1969.
Lambert then moved to London Weekend Television to produce the endearing street life series Budgie (1971-72). For LWT she also produced Between the Wars (1973), a Maugham-like collection of little-known stories from writers of the 1920s and 1930s.
Although she returned briefly to the BBC to produce Shoulder to Shoulder (1974), a series of plays based on the suffragette movement, in July 1974 she joined Thames Television as head of drama. At Thames her projects included such critically-acclaimed and popular series as Rock Follies (1976), Rumpole of the Bailey (1978-92) and the seven-part miniseries Edward and Mrs Simpson (1978), starring Edward Fox and Cynthia Harris.
At around this time Lambert launched her "Plays for Britain" series - under the umbrella title of ITV Playhouse - then ITV's only series of single plays and made up of works from contemporary writers. Among the more notable successes was Philip Mackie's film of Quentin Crisp's autobiography, The Naked Civil Servant (1975), which won both the Prix Italia and an International Emmy.
In 1976 she became creatively responsible for running Euston Films (the film production arm of Thames TV) in addition to Thames's drama department, and in 1979 became chief executive of Euston Films. She was executive producer on the highly-regarded Euston series Out (1978), Minder (1979-94), Quatermass (1979), Fox (1980), Danger UXB (1979), Widows (1983) and Reilly - Ace of Spies (1983).
In 1982 she became director of drama for Thames and again assumed responsibility for the output of both Euston Films and the Thames drama department. Later that year she also became director of production for Thorn EMI Screen Entertainment. She was named Businesswoman of the Year for 1983.
Following her acrimonious departure from the restructured Thorn EMI, in November 1985 Lambert started up her own independent television company, Cinema Verity. Its first production, filmed in Australia, was Evil Angels (screened in Britain as A Cry in the Dark), the story of Lindy Chamberlain, whose baby was said to have been taken by a dingo. Starring Meryl Streep, it marked Lambert's debut as an independent film producer.
For television Lambert was executive producer (under her company banner) of the BBC sitcom May to December (1989-94). In a collaboration between the BBC, Australia's Channel Seven and Cinema Verity, Lambert produced two series of the anarchic comedy The Boys from the Bush (1991-92). Cinema Verity also produced, for Granada Television, the seven-part comedy-drama Coasting (1990) and Alan Bleasdale's drama GBH for Channel Four (1991).
More recently her productions included two series of the comedy-drama Class Act (1994-95), Lynda La Plante's second sequel to Widows, She's Out (1995), and two seasons of dramas by new writers, Capital Lives (1994-95), all for ITV.
For the BBC Lambert produced the second series of David Renwick's "locked-room" murder mysteries Jonathan Creek (1997) and (as co-producer with the actress Joanna Lumley) moulded the six-part adaptation of Elizabeth Jane Howard's wartime novels into The Cazalets (2001).
She was appointed OBE in 2002, and had been due to receive a lifetime award at the Women In Film and Television Awards next month.
Verity Lambert had been married to Colin Bucksey, the television director, from whom she was divorced; there were no children.

Billy Boy 2001

How ironic and sad that she should shuffle off this mortal coil the day before the 44th anniversary of the first episode of Dr Who.

silverwhistle

Yes. There was a nice tribute to her in the last series, when the Doctor (incognito as the schoolmaster John Smith) gave his mother's name as "Verity".

"Trust me, I'm a doctor...!"

HIPPIEDAVE

A Legend