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Artist News Legal
Ian Brown testifies in Fred Talbot’s indecent assault trial
By Chris Cooke | Published on Wednesday 28 January 2015
Providing some celebrity intrigue to a trial that almost certainly didn’t need it, Ian Brown yesterday testified against former Granada TV weatherman and ‘This Morning’ regular Fred Talbot, who is accused of ten counts of indecent assault against five boys, dating from the late 1960s to the early 1980s when he was working as a teacher.
Brown is neither a victim nor a witness of the actual alleged assaults, but he was taught biology by Talbot when he attended Altrincham Grammar School in the 1970s. And in his testimony at Manchester Minshull Street Crown Court yesterday he recalled Talbot’s alleged inappropriate behaviour in the classroom.
According to the BBC, while recalling one class that occurred when he was aged eleven, Brown told the court how Talbot had shown his pupils “a three minute film on a Super 8 projector of a guy walking into a room dressed in denims; he sits on bed, takes his trousers down and masturbates. It was only a few years later that I realised it was probably a gay porn film. It wasn’t a sex education film. It was years later I realised it was wrong to show us that film”.
Brown went on to describe a lesson where Talbot “asked the class if any of us had ever masturbated. He wanted to know who was successful in the masturbation. He asked boys to raise their hands”. Talbot would then have “private words” with those who had done so. “I can remember sitting there wondering, ‘What is he saying to them?'”
Talbot’s defence lawyer countered that her client was delivering sex education, as you might expect in a biology class. “I doubt that’s on the curriculum”, the singer responded. While, when asked why he never told his parents about these incidents at the time, he replied:
“It was 1974. I was eleven and the teachers ruled with an iron rod. It would have been an embarrassment to tell my parents things like that”.
Talbot denies the charges against him. The case continues.
