Verity Lambert - Early Career in Independent Television

Early Career in Independent Television

Lambert was born in London, the daughter of a Jewish accountant, and educated at Roedean School. She left Roedean at sixteen and studied at the Sorbonne in Paris for a year, and at a secretarial college in London for eighteen months. She later credited her interest in the structural and characterisational aspects of scriptwriting to an inspirational English teacher. Lambert's first job was typing menus at the Kensington De Vere Hotel, which employed her because she had been to France and could speak French. 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.

Following her dismissal from Granada, Lambert took a job as a shorthand typist at ABC Television. She 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 then moved from administration to production, working on drama programming on ABC's popular anthology series Armchair Theatre. Armchair Theatre was overseen at the time by the company's new Head of Drama, Canadian producer Sydney Newman.

Catastrophic incidents could occur on Live television of this era. On 30 November 1958, while Lambert was working as a production assistant on Armchair Theatre, an actor died during a broadcast of Underground and she had to take responsibility for directing the cameras from the studio gallery while director Ted Kotcheff worked with the actors on the studio floor to accommodate the loss.

In 1961 Lambert left ABC, spending a year working as the personal assistant to American television producer David Susskind at the independent production company Talent Associates in New York. Returning to England, she rejoined ABC with an ambition to direct, but got stuck as a production assistant, and decided that if she could not find advancement within a year she would abandon television as a career.