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Verity Lambert

Verity Lambert

Production

Biography

Verity Ann Lambert OBE (27 November 1935 – 22 November 2007) was an English television and film producer. Lambert began working in television in the 1950s. She began her career as a producer at the BBC by becoming the founding producer of the science-fiction series Doctor Who from 1963 until 1965. 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. Her many credits as producer include Adam Adamant Lives!, The Naked Civil Servant, Rock Follies, Minder, Widows, G.B.H., Jonathan Creek, Love Soup and Eldorado. She also worked in the film industry for Thorn EMI Screen Entertainment. From 1985 she ran her own production company, Cinema Verity. She continued to work as a producer until the year she died. Women were rarely television producers in Britain at the beginning of Lambert's career. When she was appointed to Doctor Who in 1963, she was BBC Television's only female drama producer, as well as the youngest. 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". 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." Description above from the Wikipedia article Verity Lambert, licensed under CC-BY-SA, full list of contributors on Wikipedia.

Known For

Doctor Who
7.9

The adventures of The Doctor, a time-traveling humanoid alien known as a Time Lord. He explores the universe in his TARDIS, a sentient time-traveling spaceship. Its exterior appears as a blue British police box, which was a common sight in Britain in 1963 when the series first aired. Along with a succession of companions, The Doctor faces a variety of foes while working to save civilizations, help ordinary people, and right many wrongs.

Doctor Who

1963
Minder
7.1

Roguish comedy drama following the misadventures of small-time crook Arthur Daley.

Minder

1979
Jonathan Creek
7.5

Working from his home in a converted windmill, Jonathan Creek is a magician with a natural ability for solving puzzles. He soon puts this ability to the use of solving impossible crimes and mysterious murders.

Jonathan Creek

1997
Reilly: Ace of Spies
7.0

Reilly, Ace of Spies is a 1983 television miniseries dramatising the life of Sidney Reilly, a Russian Jew who became one of the greatest spies ever to work for the British. Among his exploits, in the early 20th-century, were the infiltration of the German General Staff in 1917 and a near-overthrow of the Bolsheviks in 1918. His reputation with women was as legendary as his genius for espionage.

Reilly: Ace of Spies

1983
Widows
7.4

Armed robbers Harry, Terry, and Joe die when the security van that they're robbing catches fire in the Kingsway Tunnel in London. Their widows–Dolly, Shirley, and Linda–find their husbands' schematics and decide to stage it themselves.

Widows

1983
Tales of the Tardis
5.6

Classic Doctor Who duos are reunited as they board a very special TARDIS on a nostalgic voyage through space and time.

Tales of the Tardis

2023
Love Soup
8.6

Parallel storylines follow English perfume saleswoman Alice Chenery and American comedy writer Gil Raymond, who are seemingly perfect soulmates but never meet, as they deal with their chaotic lives and relationships.

Love Soup

2005
G.B.H.
6.3

GBH was a seven-part British television drama written by Alan Bleasdale shown in the summer of 1991 on Channel 4. The protagonists were Michael Murray, the Militant tendency-supporting Labour leader of a city council in the North of England and Jim Nelson, the headmaster of a school for disturbed children. The series was controversial partly because Murray appeared to be based on Derek Hatton, former Deputy Leader of Liverpool City Council — in an interview in the G.B.H. DVD Bleasdale recounts an accidental meeting with Hatton before the series, who indicates that he has caught wind of Bleasdale's intentions but does not mind as long as the actor playing him is "handsome". In normal parlance, the initials "GBH" refer to the criminal charge of grievous bodily harm - however, the actual intent of the letters is that it is supposed to stand for Great British Holiday.

G.B.H.

1991
Adam Adamant Lives!
7.5

Adam Adamant Lives! is a British television series which ran from 1966 to 1967 on the BBC, starring Gerald Harper in the title role. Proposing that an adventurer born in 1867 had been revived from hibernation in 1966, the show was a comedy adventure that took a satirical look at life in the 1960s through the eyes of an Edwardian.

Adam Adamant Lives!

1966
So Haunt Me
6.6

So Haunt Me is a British television sitcom about a family that moves into a home occupied by the ghost of its previous resident, a middle-aged Jewish mother. The show was produced by Cinema Verity for the BBC and originally aired from 1992 to 1994. Peter Rokeby loses his job as advertising copywriter, and resolves to become a freelance writer. Owing to this change in circumstances, he and his wife Sally move with their children into a more modest home in Meadow Road, Willesden. The family soon finds that the ghost of a previous owner, Yetta Feldman, still occupies the residence, and has been scaring occupants away for years. Yetta is a stereotypical interfering, middle-aged Jewish mother who died suddenly after choking on a chicken bone. While Sally can both see and speak to their ghost, Peter — much to his frustration — initially cannot. The family agrees to help Yetta find her grown-up daughter Carole. So Haunt Me aired on BBC1 as 18 half-hour episodes in three series and one special from 1992 to 1994. The show was created by Paul Mendelson. The Rokeby children David and Tammy were played by Jeremy Green and Laura Howard respectively. Neighbour Mr Bloom was played by David Graham.

So Haunt Me

1992
Fox
6.5

The thirteen-part series was based around the lives of the titular Fox family, who lived in London and had gangland connections.

Fox

1980
The Cazalets
8.5

The Cazalets is a 2001 television drama series about the life of a large privileged family in the years 1937 to 1947. Most of the action takes place in London, and at the family's large estate in Sussex. The drama was based on the novels of Elizabeth Jane Howard, and adapted by the screenwriter Douglas Livingstone. The series was originally produced by Cinema Verity for BBC One and is available on DVD.

The Cazalets

2001
Quatermass
6.8

In the near future, a now-elderly Bernard Quatermass investigates the disappearance of his granddaughter and a mysterious cult.

Quatermass

1979
May to December
6.7

Comedy about a Pinner solictor who falls for a woman half his age.

May to December

1989
Class Act
N/A

Class Act is a British comedy-drama series produced by Verity Lambert, and starring Joanna Lumley, Nadine Garner, and John Bowe. The series ran for two seasons of seven episodes each. Broadcast on ITV1, the first premiered on 7 April 1994, until 19 May. The second ran from 7 September to 19 October 1995. Desperate times call for desperate measures when aristocratic Kate Swift's rich husband disappears and she is forced to give up her champagne lifestyle.

Class Act

1994
Sleepers
7.3

Amidst the thaw of glasnost, the Kremlin discovers that two Soviet agents, sent to England under deep cover in 1965, have been "lost." A beautiful and ambitious Russian agent, sent to London to track them down, becomes embroiled in a tangle of CIA, KGB and MI-5 plots and counter-plots as the two lost agents, now utterly assimilated, try to avoid detection.

Sleepers

1991
Shoulder to Shoulder
6.5

Shoulder to Shoulder is a 1974 BBC drama serial created through the collaboration of actress Georgia Brown, filmmaker Midge Mackenzie, and producer Verity Lambert. A dramatisation of the history of the women's suffrage movement in Britain, focusing on the Pankhurst family and their fight for women's right to vote, the six-part series, starring Siân Phillips as Emmeline Pankhurst, is considered a landmark in feminist television drama.

Shoulder to Shoulder

1974
The Flame Trees of Thika
7.7

Elspeth and her unconventional parents decide to settle down in Kenya and begin a coffee plantation. This is a time of discovery for Elspeth, as she encounters the incredible beauty and cruelty of nature, and new friendships with both Africans and British expatriates. A side plot involves the beautiful and bored British Lettice Palmer who enters into an affair with a handsome safari guide. Eventually, however, the excitement of Elspeth's life is disrupted by the onset of WW I, and the changes it brings.

The Flame Trees of Thika

1981
She's Out
10.0

Dolly Rawlins is free again. She has served the eight year prison sentence for her husband's murder and is now set to collect the six million pounds worth of diamonds that she stashed before she was sent down. The money will enable her to follow her dreams and start a new life. But her former cell mates have their own ideas...

She's Out

1995
Evil Angels
6.8

Based on the true story of Lindy Chamberlain who, during a family camping trip to Ayers Rock in central Australia, claimed she witnessed a dingo take her baby daughter, Azaria, from their tent. Azaria's body was never found and, after investigations and two public inquests, she is charged with murder.

Evil Angels

1988