May 1st, 2024 10 comments

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Big Finish The Lost Stories Deathworld

Available to order from www.bigfinish.com

Two Lost Stories for three Doctors

The First, Second and Third Doctors star in two new audio adaptations of never-produced-for-TV Doctor Who stories, due for release July 2024.

Since 2009, Big Finish Productions’ range Doctor Who – The Lost Stories has taken scripts and story treatments that were submitted to the BBC during the classic era of Doctor Who but never produced for television, and adapted them into full-cast audio dramas.

Two new releases in this series will be available from July this year – Deathworld and Operation Werewolf.

Deathworld is based on the original treatment, written by Bob Baker and Dave Martin, for what later became the tenth anniversary TV serial The Three Doctors. It’s very different to the story that ended up on screens – there’s no Omega here, and instead the Doctors become caught in a temporal game of chess played between the President of Gallifrey and Death itself.

The audio adaptation is written by John Dorney and features the First, Second and Third Doctors, voiced by Stephen Noonan, Michael Troughton, and Tim Treloar.

Producer David O’Mahony said: “After Baker and Martin submitted the idea for Deathworld in 1972, the story had many challenges and went through multiple rounds of re-writes and changes to characters, locations and actors, to the point that The Three Doctors was now completely different to the story first conceived.

“John Dorney and script editor Simon Guerrier wanted to go back to the original concept and explore what that idea could have been. Deathworld is the epitome of a Lost Story – taking a great idea and being able to fulfil it without the time and budget constraints of when it was pitched for television.”

Doctor Who – The Lost Stories: Deathworld is now available to pre-order as a collector’s edition 2-disc CD box set (for just £15.99) or download only (for just £12.99), exclusively from the Big Finish website.

The second release, Operation Werewolf, is based on a storyline submitted to the Doctor Who production office in 1967 by Douglas Camfield and Robert Kitts. It’s set in Normandy, 1944, three days before the D-Day landings, where the Doctor and his companions discover secret Nazi experiments.

With a script by Jonathan Morris, the audio adaptation stars Michael Troughton as the Second Doctor, Frazer Hines as Jamie, and Wendy Padbury as Zoe.

O’Mahony explained: “A combination of story elements, budget constraints, and some sensitivity about the recent World War 2 meant that Operation Werewolf was shelved. The story caught Jonathan Morris’s brilliant imagination and we ran with the original outline.

“As with all our Lost Story productions, I hope the original teams would be proud of what we have created.”

Big Finish listeners can pre-order Doctor Who – The Lost Stories: Operation Werewolf as a collector’s edition 3-disc CD box set (for just £22.99) or download only (for just £18.99).

Deathworld and Operation Werewolf are also available together as a bundle, which can be pre-ordered for just £37 (collector’s edition CDs + downloads) or £31 (downloads only).

All the above prices include the special pre-order discount and are subject to change after general release.

Categorised under: Big Finish, CD, The lost stories