Roger Lambert, 16 Feb 1928 – 29 Dec 2024

Prolific director of advertising commercials, Roger Lambert, who ran one of the busiest studios in Soho from the mid-50s to the end of the 80s, has died aged 96.

Roger Lambert possibly made more commercials than anyone in Britain because he started when ITV began in 1955 and kept going longer than nearly all of his contemporaries, finally retiring in the early 1990s.  

For more than thirty-five years, his company, Studio Lambert, produced new commercials almost every week. Unusually, they had in-house studio space and in-house crew working as staff. It was an expensive commitment, but Lambert knew if he could keep it busy, he could price his commercials competitively and create an inviting culture. And busy he kept it. 

In an industry where directors spend anxious weeks and sometimes months between jobs, Lambert always had another one lined up.  Ads for Kellogg’s Cornflakes, Heinz Baked Beans, Mr Kipling’s Cakes, Head & Shoulders, Flash, Castrol Oil, Captain Birdseye, Kattomeat, Slimcea Bread, Guinness, Cadbury’s, Crisp ’n’ Dry and hundreds more were made by Lambert and his hard-working team.  

Some won awards at the new advertising film festivals in Cannes and other European cities. Many others were more bread and butter, but there were just so many of them.  In the mid-80s, Televisual magazine declared Lambert was the busiest director in London shooting 70 commercials a year.

“It’s not the glamourous side of commercials, but I love doing it,” he once said.  “It’s what I call hardcore professional advertising and there’s always been a demand for it.  I enjoy the problem-solving element of the process and getting a good script which has a genuinely good idea rather than one that just requires beautiful shots.”

This problem solving process was Roger’s forte, and led to innovative approaches, like rewinding the film in-camera for double exposures so as to maintain the best quality image – even though this method didn’t allow for any errors!  As his expertise grew, he flourished as a versatile director of different styles of TV commercials, shooting performance-based ads like Heinz Meanz Beanz, technically intricate ads for Castrol GTX, pet ads that extracted incredible “performances” from Arthur the Cat for Kattomeat, and pioneering the “lifestyle” ad for Kelloggs Corn Flakes.

Roger Lambert was born in Hornsey, London, in 1928, the second son of Walter Lambert, a successful commercial artist who painted many of the advertising posters of the 1930s and 40s, and Hilda (nee Lawrence), also an artist.  His paternal grandfather was Walter Hibbert Lambert, an Edwardian music hall ventriloquist, who performed under the stage name “Lydia Dreams”.  

Lambert was brought up in Welwyn Garden City and after the war he went to the newly reopened Regent Street Polytechnic’s school of photography to study filmmaking, although he and an Egyptian gentleman were the only two students. He did his national service as a radar mechanic in the Fleet Air Arm and in 1953 he met Monika Wagner, a young German woman who had been orphaned during the war and had bravely come to live in Britain as part of a post war Anglo-German friendship scheme.  They married in 1956 and had three sons.   

In 1954 Roger took over a photographic studio called Studio Lambert in Beauchamp Place. When a year later advertising funded television began in Britain, Lambert realised he had found his calling.  His company abandoned stills cameras for 35mm movie cameras and started making tv ads.  

Lambert started attracting attention for his then revolutionary style of lighting.  Most commercials in the fifties and early sixties looked like badly lit B features, but Lambert used stills photography lighting and was a specialist in close-ups.  The work stood out.  

Roger and Monika had three sons: Stephen and Tim, both television producers, and Andy, a director of commercials. Stephen revived the “Studio Lambert” name when he started his own production company in 2008, subsequently making TV programmes such as Gogglebox and The Traitors.

Lambert’s wife and sons survive him, along with his brother, Trevor, and six grandchildren.