By the early 1980s, Verity Lambert's influence as a television producer and executive had made her not only one of Britain's leading business women, but possibly the most powerful member of the nation's entertainment industry. With a resume that lists many of the most noteworthy successes from the past 30 years, Lambert has served as a symbol of women's advancement in the media. By the early 1990s, however, Lam­bert's name had also become associated with one of the more spectacular disasters in the history of the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC).

     Lambert's career did not quite suggest such dramatic highs or lows when the BBC first hired her in the early l960s. She had already worked on British ABC's Armchair Theatre, a prestigious commercial television series, and she had worked in American television with David Susskind. After 18 months, however, she returned to ABC, only to quit over its refusal to hire women directors. But when the BBC hired Sydney Newman away from ABC in 1963, the BBC's new head of drama in tum brought along Lambert, who, at age 27, became the corporation's youngest producer.

     Lambert's BBC assignment, producing a new children's program, may be her most internationally known achievement; for its first three seasons (1963-65), Lambert guided the development and production of Doctor Who. Although those three seasons might easily be overlooked in the 25-plus-year history of the series, Doctor Who fans have repeatedly stressed Lambert's importance. During her tenure she both oversaw the creation of the original Doctor as a willful, often irresponsible pacifist, and presided over the phenomenal explosion of popular interest in writer Terry Nation's cyborg villains, the ever-hardy Daleks.

     As Tulloch and Alvarado argue in Doctor Who: The Unfolding Text (1983), Lambert herself represents the convergence of discourses that helped to make Doctor Who so original and enduring. Over the course of the 1970s, the BBC had sought to meet the challenge of ITV by broadening its own definition of high culture beyond the realm of classical literature and its adaptation. Coming from the upstart world of commercial television, Lambert's association with the production of original dramas, heavy in social realism, became part of the BBC's continuing efforts to maintain its audiences. Moreover, Lambert and Doctor Who were not based in the children's department, and Lambert's in­ experience with and even indifference to the established conventions of children's programming helped to lay the ground for the cross-generational audiences that made the series a groundbreaking success. Perhaps it was simply assumed that, "as a woman," Lambert was somehow automatically qualified for the job. Indeed, interviewers have often emphasized Lambert's decision not to have children of her own. Lambert has just as often refused to supply the sometimes expected displays of remorse: in the early 1980s, she cheerfully claimed, "But I can't stand babies-no, I love babies as long as their parents take them away."

     Lambert's career subsequent to Doctor Who continued to display similar mixtures of social awareness and slick commercial savvy. After producing an award­ winning series of Somerset Maugham's short stories and other projects, Lambert left the BBC in 1970 for London Weekend Television. She returned to cocreate Shoulder to Shoulder (1974), a multipart history of the suffragette movement. The next year Lambert joined Thames Television as controller of the drama department, becoming the company's director from 1982 to 1985. During that time Lambert was responsible for a number of highly successful productions with high exposure abroad, including Rumpole of the Bailey, the American Emmy­ winning Edward and Mrs. Simpson, and Quentin Crisp's landmark biography, The Naked Civil Servant.

     In 1976 Lambert had also joined the Thames subsidiary Euston Films, and from 1979 to 1982 she served as its chief executive. At Euston Films she developed Danger UXB, as well as the gangster drama, Out. She was also responsible for the 1979 Quatermass sequel, The Flame Trees of Thika, and Reilly: Ace of Spies, as well as Minder (1979-82), the popular working-class crime series, with which she is most often associated in Britain. Series such as Out, Reilly, and Minder helped to solidify her reputation as a woman who could produce tough, male-oriented programming, a reputation she has both acknowledged and decried as sexist.

     Lambert's move into feature films came when she was named head of production for Thom-EMI, replacing the man responsible for the disastrous, big budget flops Can't Stop the Music and Honky Tonk Freeway. During what she calls this "terrible, horrible time" (1982-85), Lambert did persuade the company to join with Rank Film Distribution and Channel 4 in backing a new British Screen Finance Consortium, a step that helped further blur the distinctions in Britain between film and television production.

     After leaving Thorn-EMI, her production company, Cinema Verite, produced the Meryl Streep film A Cry in the Dark (1988). Lambert's most public project, however, has been an elaborate, high-budget soap opera, Eldorado (1992-93). Like Doctor Who, El­ dorado was an attempt by the BBC to prove itself competitive in a rapidly evolving market. This time, however, Lambert was not so lucky. A disaster of fully publicized dimensions, Eldorado was only Lambert's second experience with the genre (the first was in the 1960s, The Newcomers). Critics quickly turned on Lambert's "tough" Minder reputation and blamed her for Eldorado's departures from the familiar British conventions for soap opera. The "greatest of all British television drama producers" had dared to set a soap opera in Spain, and filled it with a multilingual array of British expatriates and foreigners far removed from the milieus of either Coronation Street or the BBC's own "quality" soap, EastEnders.

     Lambert defended Eldorado to the end and continued to produce a range of programming, from sitcoms to the gritty thriller Comics (1993), written by Prime Suspect's Lynda La Plante.