Sally Salter

Sally Salter was a friend of Mickey Smith. She worked with the band No Hot Ashes in the Powell Estate, and because of this, she was a local celebrity.

Biography
Around 2002, (PROSE: Meet Rose) Salter had a band, No Hot Ashes, (AUDIO: Ghosts) of which the "Fittest Boy" of the Powell Estate, Jimmy Stone, was a bass guitarist for. (PROSE: Meet Rose)

Born "Stephen", Sally was transgender and, by 2005, had not returned to her parents' house since transitioning, referring to it as "Stephen's house". She had no place of her own, keeping clothes and a toothbrush at five different flats across the Powell Estate, including Mickey Smith's one-bedroom. (PROSE: Rose) Cleo Proctor's classmates always made fun of Sally, owing to her being trans. (AUDIO: Ghosts)

Sally was in a band called No Hot Ashes with her friends Mickey, Mook Jayasundera and Patrice Okereke. Upon the band taking on a gig at the Brook in Camden, Sally spent the morning with the group in the kitchen of Mickey Smith's flat coming up with a new name. They met up later a 6pm for a sound check. That night, Mickey Smith didn't show up, as he had been taken by the Autons, and the band were left to get Big Bone Bill to fill in. Their perfomance didn't go well, as the audience was sparse during their performance, with people only showing up to see the performance of Three Brothers from Dulwich, and they heard the applause for the band "they'd never had" in the corridor.

After their gig, Big Bone Bill had driven the drums and kit home in his van, leaving the rest of the group to wander to the Cellar Lights bar on Old Compton Street, as Patrice knew a barman there who could give them a few free drinks. However, they witnessed a trio of Autons break out of a shop window and brutally kill its owner, and the group fled. They were followed by the trio of Autons, who were joined by a group of childlike Autons who had peashooters as their weapons, and the group fled down an alleyway. However, the alley was a dead end, and they couldn't escape through any of the doors as the people inside had lokced them tightly shut, and they prepared for the worst as the Autons drew closer, however, Rose Tyler had defeated the Nestene Consciousness just at the right time, sending the advancing Autons to fall to the floor. The group then set out to raid anywhere that stocked medical supplies so that they could help those wounded. Sally later texted Rose to see if she was okay after the attack. (PROSE: Rose)

In 2022, when Cleo Proctor and Shawna Thompson entered a sandwich shop to get a coffee, they received many telephone calls from the past, one of them being from Sally Salter, asking them if "[knew when] No Hot Ashes [was] playing". (AUDIO: Ghosts)

Personality
Sally was sharp, cautious and cheerful. (PROSE: Rose)

Appearance
Sally had spiky hair and always wore a smile. (PROSE: Rose)

Behind the scenes
Apart from perhaps Charles Peters, Sally was the first trans character in the DWU to be presented in a positive light, though she only had a relatively minor part in the 2018 Rose novelisation.

Around 7 months after Russell T Davies' novelisation was published, Big Finish's audio story The Jabari Countdown introduced the first trans character to play a major role in a DWU story, Eleanor Blake. Eleanor had a brief romance with Chris Cwej, and worked alongside the Seventh Doctor to save Earth.