RTS Programme Awards 2024

“The recipient of this year’s Outstanding Achievement Award is one of Britain’s most respected and successful television executives. To be called successful in this business usually means you’ve been responsible for a few hits. But this is a creative who has produced hit after hit – he’s one of our industry’s great innovators, a true visionary who has pushed boundaries and challenged conventions and brought us some of the most talked-about shows of our times. In fact, I think it’s fair to say he’s been instrumental in the reinvention of not just one genre, but two...and I’ve no doubt there will be more to come.

Until about twenty five years ago, the concept of a ‘TV format’ was largely the domain of only entertainment producers. But as Director of Programmes at RDF Media between 1998 and 2007 Stephen pretty much reinvented factual television. He took the idea of a format, added a narrative and an easy-to-follow real-life premise, then cast it with real people. And so, the factual entertainment format was born. His first was Faking It. In the opening episode a well-spoken posh man was taught to “fake it” as a rough Cockney nightclub bouncer, before a panel of judges gave their verdict. The show became a huge hit and ran for nine series. He followed it with another audacious idea, Wife Swap. I remember the raised eyebrows from purist documentary makers at the time – but the melding of format and observational documentary was genius. Wife Swap was great entertainment, but a fascinating insight into family life too. The series was a hit for Channel 4 and sold in twenty three countries. Stephen was suddenly in the vanguard of exporting British formats to the world. He even set up in LA. But while Stephen and David Frank were busy building RDF into a production powerhouse, Stephen never strayed too far from the development coalface, creating many new formats along the way – like Shipwrecked, and The Secret Millionaire which went on to win the Rose D’Or.
All that would have been enough to cement Stephen’s place in TV history. But then Stephen did it all over again – this time at Studio Lambert, which he formed in 2008. The first show for his new company was Undercover Boss for Channel 4, a format Stephen went on to premiere in America on Super Bowl night to forty million viewers. Then came Gogglebox. Was this an entertainment show, a factual piece, or a mash-up of both, we asked ourselves? It didn’t matter, because it became another smash hit…and is still as fresh, funny and insightful as it was when it launched eleven years ago. Next came two more award winning hit shows for the BBC –
Race Across The World and his first drama, a piece about the Rochdale grooming scandal called Three Girls, which won five BAFTAs. Studio Lambert was on a creative roll.

As the world recovered from Covid, Stephen set his sights on entertainment – and began a reinvention and reinvigoration of that genre too. The reality gameshow The Traitors took the nation by storm in the Autumn of 2022, and by the time a second series was casting, Studio Lambert was deluged with forty thousand contestant applications. Only a few weeks ago Series Two delivered “some of the most addictive, electrifying TV in years”. Over eight million viewers watched the final.

And let’s not forget Netflix’s global hit Squid Game: The Challenge, which elevated the competitive game show to a whole new scale. The production values, the format beats, the meticulous attention to every detail – it carries all the hallmarks of a Stephen Lambert work.

But perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised by Stephen’s success here and on the global stage. He’s a great business man and sales man – there’s nothing like a Lambert pitch – but Stephen is a creative at heart who has a very special understanding of human nature, a talent for developing ideas that expose who we are and what makes us tick. He has a special talent for sensing what the next trend might be, and then gets busy helping to shape it. The clues were even there in his earliest days when I first met him in the BBC’s Documentary department. As a talented documentary director, producer and then EP, he made his name on award-winning strands like 40 Minutes, Inside Story and then as editor of the iconic 90’s strand Modern Times…he even spotted that docu-soaps were coming, and executive produced some of BBC One’s earliest series in that genre too. Stephen has always been a programme maker at heart drawn to play with form and bring high quality to popular pieces.

After decades in the industry, Stephen’s body of work is extensive. His awards cabinet full of RTS’s, BAFTAs and Emmys. But Stephen is a producer who’s still hungry, still looking to develop the next hit, still driven to move the dial again with the next piece of great television. He cares passionately about the programmes he produces and gathers extraordinary talent around him, he harbours a deep respect for the audience, and he loves the industry upon which he’s made such an indelible mark.”