So. The other week I posted a blog entry (“Saltaire inside out”) about visiting Shipley College and seeing the students’ 3D digital modelling work inspired by our Multi-Story Water routes. Little did I know, when mentioning that the video modelling Saltaire’s Congregational (URC) church also featured the playful addition of Doctor Who’s TARDIS, that said TARDIS would be touching down in Saltaire only two days later…

The new Doctor Who episode for Saturday 4th May was “The Crimson Horror”, by Mark Gatiss (ex-League of Gentlemen), in which the Doctor and Clara find themselves in Victorian Yorkshire… in a model industrial village called “Sweetville” that has apparently been set up to save the citizens of Bradford from the foul polluted air of the city… Go figure. Instead of Salt it’s Sweet, but the architecture is unmistakably Saltairey…

Apparently the tower in the middle – which in other shots looks remarkably like New Mill’s Italianate chimney – is hiding a rocket ship which (for reasons which escaped me) blasts off at the end of the episode. My favourite bit in this gloriously loopy story was that “Mr. Sweet” turns out to be a doll-sized, bright red, pre-historic leach — a hideous succubus on the chest of Dame Diana Rigg’s batty old villainess character… Said leach has survived over centuries in the river because of the pollutants keeping it alive… Now it has cleverly developed a scheme to produce its own red venom on an, ahem, industrial scale, in order to turn workers into obedient zombies. If the venom backfires it just turns you into a crimson corpse, in which case you just get thrown into the canal for the local police to haul out later… So there you have it. River and canal, both being recognised as fundamental to the Saltaire… sorry, the Sweetville story…