Review: Doctor Who: Operation Werewolf
- cepmurphywrites
- Mar 14
- 7 min read
By Matthew Kresal
The Second World War has loomed large over western popular culture ever since it took place. Which makes it odd, perhaps, that the BBC’s Doctor Who only did its first serial set during the conflict in 1989 with The Curse of Fenric. Yet it might have done so as early as its first decade if things had gone a little differently with a script co-written by one of the series most prolific directors. A script at last brought to life in 2024 by Big Finish Productions as part of their Doctor Who – The Lost Stories range of audio dramas with the release of Operation Werewolf.
Operation Werewolf began its life in 1965 while William Hartnell was still playing the Doctor and Douglas Camfield was directing the serial The Daleks' Master Plan. In the midst of directing its dozen episodes, Camfield had worked with script editor Donald Tosh and the cast to improve upon the sometimes slight scripts from writers Terry Nation and Dennis Spooner. It was apparently during Camfield’s work on The Daleks' Master Plan that he made a comment about the lack of script quality to his friend Robert Kitts. Kitts, as he told writer Dallas Jones years later for DWB, then made a fateful comment of his own: “Why don’t you write one?” To which Camfield replied that Kitts would have to help him.
The storyline that Camfield and Kitts created stemmed out of the former’s interest in the Second World War. Entitled Operation Werewolf, it would see Patrick Troughton’s Doctor and companions Jamie McCrimmon and Victoria Waterfield arrive in France mere days before the invasion of Normandy. There, they would discover that the Nazis had perfected a crude method of matter transference (something added, as Kitts told Jones, to help with pace as “we couldn’t have the characters continually flying to and fro!”). With help from a traitor inside British intelligence who hid his affiliation with Mosley’s British fascists, the titular operation would see the Nazis planning to use gas to paralyze and then brainwash the assembled allied forces into conquering Britain for them. With the help of the French resistance and British agent Doctor Fergus McCrimmon (who is implied to be a descendant of Jamie), the Doctor would work with both the British military and the resistance to try and defeat the plan and keep history on track.
After two years of working on their pitch, Camfield finally took it into the Doctor Who production office on September 18th, 1967. The pitch, with its wartime setting, immediately caught the attention of producer Innes Lloyd who had served as a member of the wartime SAS. Lloyd would offer his response back on the 3rd of October. Lloyd’s notes, reproduced in part both in DWB issue 50 and its 1993 compendium, showcase both Lloyd’s knowledge (if not firsthand experience) of the war and desire to ground the science fiction elements of the pitch in wartime reality. Lloyd was impressed enough to commission an episode outline and eventually a script for the opening instalment, both of which Camfield and Kitts would deliver to the BBC.
It was at that point that the chaotic nature of the Troughton era production office caught up with the serial. As Kitts would tell Jones twenty years later, issues with the series budget and Lloyd vacating the producer’s chair would join with Camfield’s ongoing work as a director to keep Operation Werewolf from making it to the screen. Though Camfield would direct more serials for Doctor Who between the end of the 1960s and the mid-1970s, even receiving another story-line commission from Tom Baker era producer Philip Hinchcliffe involving the French Foreign Legion that would have written out Sarah Jane Smith, he would never write for Doctor Who on-screen. He would pass away from a heart attack in January 1984. Kitts would continue to work in British television until 1973 and would emigrate to Australia, passing away in 2002. Operation Werewolf would feature in DWB in the 1980s and its 1993 compendium but would fade into Doctor Who obscurity.
At least for a while. In 2008, Big Finish began producing a number of unmade serials from Classic Who as audio dramas. Initially focusing on unmade stories from the era of Colin Baker’s Sixth Doctor, the company’s attention soon turned to scripts and outlines from other Doctors. While a number of Troughton era stories would be produced during the original Lost Stories run from 2009-13, it wouldn’t be until 2024 that Operation Werewolf would at last be produced and released for fans to hear it more than a half-century after its original conception.
One thing that instantly separates Operation Werewolf from previous Second Doctor Lost Stories (such as Lords of the Red Planet) is that it’s full-cast and without narration. Whereas Jamie actor Frazer Hines had previously performed the role of the Doctor previously alongside Jamie and narration duties, the Doctor would be played here by Patrick Troughton’s son Michael, who had taken the role in various releases since 2022. The result is something which feels more natural and closer to what audiences might have gotten on television in the 1960s, though it also meant that adapter Jonathan Morris had to find ways of bringing more visual or action sequences into the audio medium.
Which was not the only challenge that Morris faced. As Morris told Big Finish’s Vortex magazine, the original pitch with Lloyd’s comments and the episode outline were the only things that survived as the first episode script had been lost. Morris would take both surviving versions as his basis and work with them to create the full six-episode serial, fleshing it out as Camfield and Kitts would have done in the late 1960s. Part of which also meant a change in the Doctor’s female companion, as the original documents featured Deborah Watling’s Victoria. Watling had passed away in 2017 and yet to be recast by Big Finish and, as Morris noted, by the time the serial would have gone into production Victoria would have departed the series in the serial Fury From the Deep. Morris would take the step of working in Wendy Padbury’s Zoe into the script instead. Morris would aim to make minimal changes, telling Vortex, “For me, the point of the Lost Stories is to present the adventures as authentically as possible but in the best light."
That dedication is apparent in Morris’ script. Despite being six episodes, Operation Werewolf manages to avoid the mid-serial slowing of pace or outright wheel-spinning that so often impacted televised serials. Instead, Operation Werewolf presents itself as something of a Doctor Who take on things such as the works of Alistair MacLean with The Guns of Navarone or films such as Operation Crossbow. Or, indeed, offering pre-echoes of the work of Jack Higgins who would feature Nazi commandos in Britain in his novel The Eagle Has Landed and other novels featuring traitors within the British establishment seeking to aid the Nazi cause. Alongside those tropes, Operation Werewolf drops in a number of elements that firmly place into Doctor Who’s realm of science fiction including matter transference (where Camfield made reference to The Daleks' Master Plan), the presence of not one but two members of the McCrimmon family from centuries apart, and the possibility of history being changed. The resulting audio drama is a solid wartime thriller with science fiction elements, one which likely plays better on audio when freed from the inevitable budget restrictions that late 1960s Doctor Who faced.
Operation Werewolf’s audio presentation also benefits from how well put together it is, starting with the TARDIS crew. Michael Troughton ably slipped into his father’s role by capturing the cadences and mannerisms of the Second Doctor, what the late Barry Letts termed the “semi-improvisation” that Troughton brought on-screen. It’s something that captures the best of the Second Doctor as a character even while not being an exact vocal match by one Troughton for the other. Hines and Padbury slip seamlessly into their original TV roles, each given plenty to do as actors/characters from Jamie teaming up with a future McCrimmon and Zoe’s photographic memory with her knowledge of the future adding to the tension when she’s placed under pressure by the Nazis. It’s a superb recreation of one of the best TARDIS crews of Classic Who and which sees them put to great use.
Beyond Troughton, Hines, and Padbury lies a solid production. The supporting cast contains a solid mix of British and German actors, including David O’Mahony (who also directs) as Dr Fergus McCrimmon, Leonie Schliesing as SS Hauptsturmführer Leni Bruckner, Jordan Loughran as resistance member Françoise, and Michael Higgs as the Sir Aubrey Fanshaw-Smith. The icing on the cake comes in the form of the sound design and music from Big Finish veteran Jamie Robertson who captures the feel of the era from the aural equivalent of the occasional serial specific episode title sequences to soundscapes across rural France and the south of England and a simple but effective music score, making the listening experience like stepping into the timeline where Operation Werewolf made it to television screens.
A superb audio drama, to be sure, but how might it have fared on television? The scope of it feels grand, even cinematic, but Camfield as a director proved with serials such as The Invasion and The Seeds of Doom that he could get a lot out of Doctor Who’s budgets. If he had been at the helm, it could very well have been a classic of its era. Or, as has proven to be the case with so many serials from 1960s Doctor Who, eventually wiped and junked by the BBC to exist only on audio. So perhaps we’ve come to the same destination via a different route.
Either way, Operation Werewolf is a cracking good story and a fine example of Big Finish’s work with their Lost Stories range.
Matthew Kresal is, among other things, the author of the SLP book Our Man on the Hill and short stories in the anthologies AlloAmericana, The Emerald Isles, and The Scottish Anthology.
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