Verity Ann Lambert was born in London on 27 November 1935, the daughter of a Jewish accountant, and was educated at Roedean School.
She left Roedean at sixteen with six O-levels and pursued a brief language course at the University of Paris before enrolling at a secretarial college in London for 18 months.
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.
She then took a job as a shorthand-typist at ABC Television and soon became the secretary to the company’s Head of Drama and then a production secretary working on a programme called State Your Case.
A move from administration to production found her working on drama programming on ABC’s popular anthology series Armchair Theatre and also early episodes of The Avengers.
When her old boss, Sydney Newman, left ABC to become Head of Drama at BBC Television, he took Lambert with him and made her the founding producer of the new science-fiction series Doctor Who from 1963 until 1965.
She was the youngest – and the only female – producer in the drama department, often facing down sexist assumptions about her promotion (“They used to ask me if I’d slept with Sydney Newman to get the job”, she revealed in 2006), but she soon developed a reputation for being hard-headed.
Lambert left Doctor Who in 1965, moving to another fantasy series developed by Newman, Adam Adamant Lives! (1966-67).
She left the BBC in 1969 and worked for other television companies, notably having a long association with Thames Television and its Euston Films offshoot in the 1970s and 1980s.
She also worked in the film industry for Thorn EMI Screen Entertainment. From 1985, she ran her own production company (Cinema Verity) and continued to work as a producer.
The company produced the sitcoms May to December (1989-94) and So Haunt Me (1992-94), along with the critically adored Alan Bleasdale drama GBH. The company was also behind the BBC’s short-lived soap opera Eldorado(1992-93) – a rare dud from the esteemed programme maker.
She was awarded an OBE in the 2002 New Year’s Honours list for her services to film and television production.
She then took a job as a shorthand-typist at ABC Television and soon became the secretary to the company’s Head of Drama and then a production secretary working on a programme called State Your Case.
She left the BBC in 1969 and worked for other television companies, notably having a long association with Thames Television and its Euston Films offshoot in the 1970s and 1980s.
