Verity Lambert

Her description of his reaction was that it seemed like a weight had been lifted from his shoulders.

He immediately contacted Verity Lambert, who I'd not met previously, and asked her to take a look at me at the producer's run on the Thursday afternoon, and again on the recording on the Friday evening.

Well, I must have done something right, because...

After the recording on the Friday, I was invited by Verity and Dennis Spooner, the story editor, to join them for a drink in Studio 3.

Well, yeah, I think we can appreciate more of a classic now we've gone through.

Hartnell or some of Hartnell at this point and I'm starting to appreciate William Hartnell's legacy more now than probably 3-4 years ago

yeah yeah for me it's looking at the beginning of a really long lasting show how the you know, Verity Lambert Sid Newman and everyone came together to create a fantastic show that can reinvent itself endlessly.

It's got huge potential.

ring modulator and we tried various things and we settled on this voice which ended up being such a huge part of what makes them work

so i i'm going to try and formulate a sentence here so bear with me but the success of this story is a sort of massive confluence and coincidence where you have kind of four or five elements that really made something electrifying you had obviously the script you had the design you had the sound production you had the fact of jfk being shot while they were recording a scene where they're all supposed to be disorientated and scared um you had so many things and if just one of them hadn't worked this really wouldn't have been the production that it was and as i think we kind of uncovered at the time we were talking about it the that's true of the series as a whole you've got Verity Lambert's production you've got the direction of you know Waris Hussain and others you've got the performances you've got the design of things like the TARDIS and again if any one of those things hadn't quite been what needed to be the whole thing falls apart like a like a long forgotten ill-conceived 60s fantasy show so you know everything that we we think about season one of doctor who we can also say about this story the daleks which is that somehow despite all the odds and thanks to no one no one person's vision but by a sort of bizarre example of a committee producing something wonderful we've got this

amazing piece of televisual art I think you summed that up very well.

Thanks, mate.

Yeah.

Yeah, that came out in early 1963, and that's when Verity Lambert spotted them.

but she already knew him as an actor but you know that was one that kind of made it stand out because he was playing a sort of a more vulnerable quieter gentler person so it kind of showed that you could do both

I remember a bit of this.

I mean, The Daleks were lightning in a bottle, right? I mean, this right here, this story, whether it's abridged or whether you watch all seven episodes, I mean, everything came together.

Everything fit like a glove because you had Verity Lambert, who was aggressive as a producer, right? She was the only woman producer in serials at the BBC.

and come hell or high water, she was going to make a name for herself.

And Terry nation had this storyline and David Whitaker cleaned up the script and, and put it on the screen and Raymond Cusick designed the Daleks.

They did not renew her because she's shit.

There was quite an early correspondence with Verity Lambert that said, we don't want her to continue beyond what she's been contracted for.

So they knew she wasn't working.

Yeah.

Verity.

So Verity Lambert had to go up and ask for it to be re-shown, right? Oh,

well, that's one thing.

This was never a problem with it being re-shown.