The Early Life of Verity Lambert

Such is the way of life that having just celebrated the origins of “Doctor Who” in my previous post, I am saddened to report the death of the show’s original Producer, Verity Lambert, on Thursday, 22nd November, 2007. She died on the eve of her most famous creation’s forty-fourth anniversary and just five days before she would’ve turned seventy-two. Verity’s numerous achievements beyond our much-cherished, then-fledgling, Saturday teatime series are well-documented elsewhere so, as you might expect of this author, I am going to focus on her enormous contribution to the success of my favourite programme. Back in 1963, having moved to the BBC from ITV, at the request of Sydney Newman, she was given charge of producing a new, semi-educational, family-orientated science fiction serial at the tender age of twenty-seven. Not only did she become the youngest person to hold such an important position at the Corporation but she was also the only woman which, at that time, was unheard of! Sydney’s faith in her was well-founded though, as borne out in her realisation of his concept. There was minor disagreement over the introduction of those bug-eyed monsters the Daleks but, on realising their popularity, Canadian Newman acquiesced that Verity obviously knew the series better than he did!

Verity Lambert stayed with “Doctor Who” for two years producing a total of seventy-eight episodes (each approximately twenty-five minutes in length) transmitted between Saturday, 23rd November, 1963 and Saturday, 9th October, 1965. “An Unearthly Child”, the opening episode, introduced us to the Doctor, as played by William Hartnell, and his three companions: science teacher Ian Chesterton (William Russell), history teacher Barbara Wright (Jacqueline Hill) and Granddaughter Susan Foreman (Carole Ann Ford). Central to the story is the teachers’ discovery, in a scrap yard of all places, of the Doctor’s TARDIS; a ship which can travel through space and time disguised from the outside as a Police Box! Ironically, Verity’s final broadcast episode, “Mission to the Unknown”, featured none of the regular cast but was used by way of an introduction to the massive twelve-part “Daleks’ Master Plan” epic which would follow the four-part historical “The Myth Makers”. Between her first and last episodes she oversaw three full Dalek serials, the first two of which, “The Daleks” and “The Dalek Invasion of Earth”, are undoubted classics while the latter, “The Chase”, exploded into an all-out battle between the Daleks and the Mechonoids. As her time on the series drew to a close, Verity introduced us to the Zarbi on “The Web Planet” and the Meddling Monk (Peter Butterworth), the original renegade with a TARDIS of his own, in “The Time Meddler”. Perhaps because this was a time when everything seemed fresh and new, the sheer volume of creativity that the original Producer of “Doctor Who” brought to the programme has never been surpassed and is never likely to be.