Television producer; Born November 27, 1935; Died November 22, 2007.

Verity Lambert, who has died aged 71, was one of the great pioneering women producers of British television. Not only was she a woman in a man's world when she took charge of her first BBC series in 1963, she was also the youngest producer at the corporation, at just 27 years old.

Little was expected of that first low-budget series. It was aimed at children, and while it was ostensibly science-fiction, the BBC also intended it to be educational at the same time, with the protagonists dropping into events at various different points in history and meeting the Ancient Romans, the Aztecs and Marco Polo.

Lambert pushed for more fantastical and other-worldly elements. One series is still around 44 years after the first episode was broadcast and it is as popular as ever - Doctor Who.

Lambert produced 78 episodes during the first three seasons, including the earliest outings by the Daleks. They may be an institution now, but Lambert had to fight the scepticism of BBC management before getting them on to the screen.

She went on to shape, nurture and manage dozens of other TV series, serials, sitcoms and one-off dramas. Some are landmarks in British television, while others retain or have acquired a cult audience.

A long list of credits includes such familiar and fondly-remembered titles as Adam Adamant Lives! (1966), The Naked Civil Servant (1975), Rock Follies (1976-77), Minder (1979-84), Widows (1983), GBH (1991) and Jonathan Creek (1998-2004).

Lambert held several senior executive positions in television and in the 1980s took charge of production at the Thorn EMI film company. Following restructuring and an acrimonious departure, she founded her own company, Cinema Verity, the name a play on the French phrase meaning cinema of truth. It produced material for both cinema and television, ranging from the "dingo took my baby" movie A Cry in the Dark (1988), starring Meryl Streep, to the short-lived BBC soap Eldorado (1992-93).

Born in London in 1935, Lambert was educated at Roedean, the Sorbonne and then secretarial college. It was as a secretary that she joined Granada Television in 1956. Her TV career almost ended before it began, when she was sacked after just six months.

However, she got a job as a typist at ABC Television, another of the ITV regional companies of the time, and worked her way up to production secretary and then production assistant.

She had a brief spell in the US, returned to ABC, but she seemed to be making little headway when she got the chance to join the BBC under Sydney Newman. The Canadian had been head of drama during Lambert's first stint at ABC and it was he who came up with the original concept for Doctor Who.

Doctor Who not only established Lambert's reputation in the television industry, but brought her wider coverage in the media as a result of the programme's success and a combination of her age, gender and good looks. These combined with a feisty temperament, which meant she was more than prepared to stand her ground in arguments with colleagues.

In 1965 she produced the initial episodes of The Newcomers, a twice-weekly soap set on a new housing estate, while also developing the idea for Adam Adamant Lives! Inspired by the old Sexton Blake detective stories, Adam Adamant starred Gerald Harper as a swashbuckling Edwardian gentleman who has been frozen in a block of ice, thaws out and is bemused by pop music and mini-skirts, while fighting the continuing menace of the criminal classes.

Moving to London Weekend Television she produced Budgie (1971), a prototype for Minder, starring Adam Faith and Iain Cuthbertson. This was followed in 1974 by her appointment as head of drama at Thames Television. She commissioned a mixture of solid, traditional drama and edgier material, including The Naked Civil Servant, a Bafta-winning adaptation of the memoirs of the gay icon Quentin Crisp.

Lambert also oversaw production on such popular series as Rock Follies, Edward and Mrs Simpson and Rumpole of the Bailey, which began in 1978, but which, like several other projects throughout her career, would continue for years after she moved on.

For a while Lambert was running both Thames drama and the company's Euston Films subsidiary. Despite the name, Euston made both film and television. While at Euston she initiated the long-running Minder series.

At Thorn EMI, Lambert was executive producer on the comedies Morons from Outer Space (1985) and Clockwise (1986), with John Cleese. Under her Cinema Verity banner, productions included A Cry in the Dark, Eldorado, the sitcom May to December (1989-94) and The Cazalets (2001). She also continued to work as a producer for the BBC, on Jonathan Creek and Love Soup. Her most recent episodes of the latter are still to be shown.

In 2002 she was made an OBE. She had already been honoured a couple of years earlier in a British Film Institute poll on the 100 Greatest British TV Programmes of the 20th Century when Doctor Who and The Naked Civil Servant came third and fourth.

Lambert never married and had no children, though in an episode of Doctor Who earlier this year, The Doctor refers to his parents as Sydney and Verity.