Doctor Who: Tip of the Tongue

The Fifth Doctor story goes to Patrick Ness, an author whose work is not known to me.

In WWII Maine a strange fad grips a village; a strange fashion for 'Truth-Tellers', which say what you really mean even if you wouldn't have had the courage. The resulting rash of honesty is tearing the town apart, and that is when the blue box arrives.

Ness takes an interesting tack, focusing his story on two of the local children - a mixed-race girl and a German Jewish boy in 1940s Maine, who are thus set up to be semi-outsiders in their own world - while the Fifth Doctor and Nyssa appear only intermittently throughout the narrative. The result is largely successful, in part because the Fifth Doctor's role was, more than any other, to be a man in the background, perhaps in response to Tom Baker's larger-than-life presence.

As with Spear of Destiny, Tip of the Tongue is a pseudo-historical, which helps with the social commentary side of the story, concerned as it is with intolerance and the false virtue of universal honesty.

Tip of the Tongue is a good little story, and if it's a little short on Doctor, its no less a Doctor Who story for that.