STAFF at a Corwen company are thrilled after one of their products appeared in a Saturday night murder mystery on the BBC. 

Ruth Lee, which manufactures mannequins for use in rescue simulations all over the world, saw one of its water rescue dummies grace the screen on Silent Witness last week.

The scene showed detectives throwing the dummy into a river to find out where a body may have drifted to.

The next day the company's inbox was flooded with customers letting them know of their newly found stardom.

Sarah Hampson, marketing executive at Ruth Lee, said: “It's not every day you see your own products floating down the river on TV."

“When it was ordered, they weren't allowed to show us the details, although we knew it would be water related because of the model.

“It was a big surprise for us, the managing director Paul MacDonald is a big fan of the show and immediately started tweeting about it. 

“He was really thrilled.

“It was a scene in which they were trying to investigate if a body was thrown into a river and how it arrived where it was found.

“This mannequin is meant to behave like a body would in water, it's specially weighted and it was supposed to give them a realistic idea of how the body would move in the Thames.

“So they showed them throwing it in by a weir and seeing where it went.

“A few of our customers let us know they'd seen it; they're quite recognisable. A lot of fire and emergency services use these dummies, so it must have been quite surprising for them too.

“The product itself was a ‘man overboard’ mannequin. We've got two models; one to simulate a drowning man, one to simulate an unconscious man.

“We tested this mannequin quite extensively to make the most realistically behaving dummy possible.

According to Sarah, Ruth Lee's dummies have been showing up all over the world.

Sarah continued: “These mannequins have also been used in Brazil to research shark attacks.

“Seven imported mannequins are being used in the study of coastal currents which will map areas in the sea where the bodies of victims of drowning and shark attacks are swept before being returned to land by the waves.”