A Canterbury Tale takes place on the same evening that the twins get into trouble in Interlude in the Thirty-Third Century. The three couples, The Doctor and Rose, Jackie and Christopher, David and Susan are doing something quite normal – having a meal in a restaurant. They begin to talk about past adventures and this story is a flashback to the time when The Doctor and Susan were living on Earth in the police box in Totters Lane.  

There is an apocryphal story about the ghost of the monk fixed onto the pillar in the crypt by a photographer’s flash. It is not a part of the usual Cathedral lore and doesn’t appear in any of the official guides. The only internet site I managed to find that mentioned it seems to be shut down now. But I DID come across the story by word of mouth and thought it would be interesting to explore it as a Doctor Who theme. Several ways of approaching it completely failed, though, before the idea of a flashback came to me. It allowed an opportunity to explore The Doctor and Susan’s relationship in a little more detail, particularly her frustration when he doesn’t take her school life seriously, and his refusal to believe that she was right and he was wrong about the alien life form trapped in the pillar. Since this is something Rose and Jackie can relate to, it brings the story right back to their present in the end.

That Canterbury Cathedral might have survived the Dalek Invasion and been a focus of the thanksgiving afterwards is not a huge stretch of the imagination. It survived the blitz and was such a focus then.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canterbury_Cathedral

http://www.canterbury-cathedral.org/visit/index.htm

http://www.faculty.de.gcsu.edu/~dvess/ids/medieval/canterbury/canterbury.shtml