A Pioneer Among Her People by Robert Smith? 22/11/18
It didn't actually happen on November 23rd, but that was the day most people heard about it. Perhaps it was surprising, perhaps it was something you might have been expecting, but there's no denying the news hit a nerve. Yes, sadly, precisely 44 years after JFK was killed by an assassin's bullet, Verity Lambert passed away, from cancer.
In 1963, Verity Lambert was the youngest producer the BBC had ever seen. She was also their first female drama procuer. And she was a pioneer in other ways too. In 1958, at just 22 years old, she dealt with the infamous death of actor Gareth Jones on live TV -- moments before he was due to appear in a scene -- with aplomb, taking control of directing the cameras from the studio gallery while the director hastily prepped the actors to cover the loss. She was Doctor Who's original producer, guiding the fledgling program to fruition and seeing potential in the Daleks where Sydney Newman couldn't. And she later created her own successful independent film company, Cimena Verity.
Looking back now, we think of the time in which Doctor Who first appeared as a distant memory, when everything was in black and white, and much of what we took for granted in the next half-century was in the process of being created: the internet, post-Empire negotiations, the dominance of the United States. However, 1963 was a time of great upheaval, both in the world and the UK. The after-effects of the Second World War were still being felt, but the Cold War was in full flight. The British Empire was in collapse, but technology was racing ahead. It was a time of great uncertainty but also great hope.
From January through April, the UK winter was so harsh that it was dubbed "The Big Freeze". The MacMillan government was so rocked by scandal that the Prime Minister was to be out of office by October, his conservative government lasting only one further year. The Coca-Cola Company debuted its first diet drink, TaB Cola, in May. In June, Vostok 6 carried Soviet cosmonaut Valentina Tereshkova, the first woman, into space. In July, NASA launched Syncom, the world's first geostationary satellite. Martin Luther King Jr delivered his "I Have A Dream" speech in August. Before the year was out, Kenya and Zanzibar would achieve independence from British rule. In early November, a coup in South Vietnam set the stage for what would become the Vietnam War. Oh, and Harvey Ball invented the ubiquitous smiley face :-)
Into all of this stepped Verity Lambert's vision for Doctor Who. At a time when the future seemed both bright and terrifying, and when the past seemed further away than ever before, came a show dedicated to educating children about each. Not content to rest on the mandate of staid institutional television, however, Lambert saw in the show the potential for grabbing the public consciousness in a way her much older bosses couldn't.
When the show debuted, Verity was only 27, younger than Peter Davison when he took on the role as the Doctot and younger than Philip Hinchcliffe when he assumed the producership -- both notoriously young for their parts. She was closer to the target audience than anyone else in a senior role on the production team and hence had her finger on the generational puls in a way that no one else could. Without her, the show would still have been made, but it would likely have been plodding and patronising educational fare that would have lasted 13 weeks.
Sydney Newman's vision was an important one, have no doubt, but he was clearly better at the big picture than the details. Newman envisioned a single story idea to demonstrate his idea of what Doctor Who should be: namely, that the Doctor and his companions Cliff, Lola McGovern and Sue should be shrunk down to one inch in height and forced to explore Cliff's science laboratory. This idea appeared in multiple forms, usually as the planned introductory story. It was eventually filmed as Planet of Giants, but the result was so drab that Lambert excised an entire episode from the finished product.
Which gives you a bit of an idea of just how strong Verity Lambert's producership must have been. You just can't imagine Phil Collinson deciding that Russell T Davies' latest masterpiece wasn't up to scratch and deleting an entire quarter of the story in the editing room. For a young upstart -- and a woman at that -- to be so impudent must have made the BBC Boys' Club cold with fear.
Verity Lambert's first success was in defending the Daleks; her second was in bringing them back. Indeed, Terry Nation was recommissioned so quickly that he ends up with 19 episodes in the first 51, or almost 40% of the first producton block's output. Despite being definitively killed off int heir first appearance, Lambert nevertheless realised that the Daleks were clearly the show's biggest asset and brought them back not only to star in the show's second season, but again in the third, setting a precedent of an annual Dalek story that we're still seeing today.
The early Hartnell years were created with a very careful formula: one historical, one futuristic story and a "sideways" story. It's a brilliant formula, one that could easily sustain a series over several years. You can see why the show was quickly recommissioned beyond its original 13-episode remit.
And, of course, the show immediately set about subverting that formula. The Romans, which should be a lavish, historical story, becomes Doctor Who's first outright comedy, bordering on farce. It's followed by The Web Planet, a story so ambitious -- featuring no humans whatsoever, aside from the TARDIS crew -- that it was talked about for decades afterwards, even despite the deficiencies in the script. The first new compnaion gets an entire two-episode character study to soothe cautious viewers.
That year's "sideways" story even twists the axis of what constitutes "sideways". Previously it had involved stories where the entire atmosphere was an otherworldly version of something familiar: the TARDIS itself in The Edge of Destruction becomes a nightmarish world out to destroy its inhabitants; familiar, everyday objects like kitchen sinks become lethal traps in Planet of Giants. But there's nothing like The Space Museum, before or since. The setting -- an alien museum with a rebelling underclass -- isn't strange; the aliens -- humanoids with fuzzy eyebrows -- are barely noticeable; and there aren't even any monsters. Even the idea of time travel isn't done in a way that fits the parameters the series had established: this isn't forwards or backwards, this is some strange vision of alternate futures and what-might-have-beens, where time actually catches up to the present.
This is immediately followed by The Chase, Season Three's annual Dalek story -- except that the Daleks are used for comic relief, the Beatles appear and even the Doctor's explanation about the strangeness of the otherworldly realm that is the human mind turns out to be a sucker punch for the viewer, when it's revealed to be a simple funfair. And then the season closes with what looks like a bog-standard historical set in 1066 -- a year so blindingly obvious for a historical setting that you're actually surprised they waited even as long as this -- but turns everything upside down when we discover that, in order of increasing surprise, 1) history is being changed, 2) that there are more of the Doctor's people in existence, 3) that one of them is up to no good, 4) the Doctor's hitherto amazing TARDIS is a quaint old relic, and 5) the Monk isn't even a villain proper but is just an overgrown child.
Lambert's tenure closed where her success began: yet another Dalek story, only this time featuring just the tin villains and none of the regular cast. There isn't even a filmed intert of Hartnell on a monitor or a single reference to the TARDIS crew. More than 50 years on, it remains the only Doctor Who story to have achieved this. It makes the double-banked episodes of the Russell T Davies era look positively tame by comparison.
Annual Dalek stories, villainous Time Lords, tiny character peices, somebody trying to change history, terror in everyday objects, complex alien societies with their own rules, Doctor Who as comedy, a revolving door of companions... these are all aspects of the series that were introduced under Lambert's watch and which would go on to be the staples for the series until the present day. Little wonder that John Smith's mother in 2007's Human Nature is named Verity.
However, most of all, her greatest gift to the series was in forcing it to constantly reinvent itself, right from the beginning, to continually push the envelope. Thanks to the astonishing groundwork laid down in its first two years, the series was marked as one where absolutely anything was not only possible, it was probably going to be on the telly next Saturday. By the time the series did the unthinkable and replaced its leading man with an entirely different character, the show was broad enough to take it in its stride. We see Verity Lambert's DNA in every era of the show's history, from Troughton and Pertwee right up to the present day.
For her, Doctor Who was just one job in a long and successful film and television career that lasted until the year she died. For us, she was absolutely essential. But she always retained an interest in the show, from trying to take over the reins in the early nineties to DVD commentaries this century. She died weeks before she was due to be presented with a Lifetime Achievement Award at the Women in Film and Television Awards, which seems tragically ironic and incredibly uplifting at the same time.
More than half a century later, long after many of the concerns and the joys of 1963 have passed into history, we're still watching -- and enjoying -- Verity Lambert's Doctor Who. There can be no greater testament to her legacy than that.