TDP 35: Pre Christmas Show Tribute to Verity Lambert

Описание: Verity Ann Lambert, OBE (27 November 1935 – 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.




Lambert 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]




Lambert began working in television in the 1950s, and continued to
work as a producer up until the year she died. After leaving the BBC in
1969, 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.




The British Film Institute's Screenonline
website describes Lambert as "one of those producers who can often
create a fascinating small screen universe from a slim script and
half-a-dozen congenial players."[2] The website of the Museum of Broadcast Communications
hails her as "not only one of Britain's leading businesswomen, but
possibly the most powerful member of the nation's entertainment
industry ... Lambert has served as a symbol of the advances won by
women in the media"[3]. News of her death came on the 44th anniversary of the first showing of Doctor Who.








Contents
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1 Early career in independent television2 BBC career3 Thames Television and Euston Films4 Cinema Verity5 References6 External links










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[edit] Early career in independent television
Lambert 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]
She later credited her interest in the structural and
characterisational aspects of scriptwriting to an inspirational English
teacher.[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]








ABC Television's studios at Didsbury in Manchester, where Lambert worked in the late 1950s.


Following 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.




On 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]




In 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]
Returning to England, she rejoined ABC with an ambition to direct, but
got stuck as a production assistant, and decided that if she could not
find advancement within a year she would abandon television as a career.[5]









[edit] BBC career
In 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,
a programme he had personally initiated. Conceived by Newman as an
educational science-fiction series for children, the programme
concerned the adventures of a crotchety old man travelling through
space 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]




Although Lambert was not Newman's first choice to produce the series — Don Taylor[9] and Shaun Sutton[10]
had both declined the position — the...