RIP Verity Lambert

[hoggers]

From The Times
November 24, 2007


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