A FORMER Coronation Street director has said he believed he was partaking in role-play with an adult when he talked sexually online with an undercover police officer posing as a 13-year-old girl.

Prosecutors allege that Tim Dowd thought he was talking to an under-aged girl called Chantelle when he asked intimate questions about "phone sex" and requested images of her breasts.

A jury at Leeds Crown Court heard that the 66-year-old asked the undercover officer, who was posing as a teenager living in a care home, whether she had partaken in sexual activity before.

Prosecutors said the defendant, of Chatsworth Grove in Harrogate, North Yorkshire, had contacted a user named Chantelle13Cymru on a chat site called Lycos on January 12 last year.

The court heard that Dowd, who has also worked on episodes of Emmerdale and Heartbeat during his 30-year career, immediately asked the person to clarify their age, before remarking that them being 13 was "not a problem".

Extracts of the conversations, which quickly moved on to WhatsApp, show Dowd asking about the other person's breast size.

Giving evidence on Wednesday, Dowd said that when he starting talking to "Chantelle", he believed it was an adult woman looking to enjoy "younger girl-older man role-play".

Asked why he had started using the site, the father-of-two, who was married when he signed up nearly five years ago, said: "I wanted to go on there to find adult women who were interested in sharing some erotic conversation with me."

Holding back tears, he added: "There were moments in my marriage where I felt quite lonely. I felt unloved, and I wanted to go on to this site to find women to talk to in order to fill that kind of void."

Asked what he had thought when he saw "13" in the undercover officer's username, he said: "I believed that this was an adult who wanted to pretend to be 13.

"I was not really concerned what it was about, what I was concerned about was whether they had a sexual fantasy that I could engage with, regardless of whether I was interested in it or not."

Dowd added that when the user declined to send him pictures, this served as "confirmation" that he was talking with an adult, saying he would have left the chat immediately if he had been sent an image of a child.

The defendant said he does not have a sexual interest in children, adding that he has never had any complaints about his conduct during his time as a freelance director, and telling jurors: "I have worked with hundreds of children during my career, and have guided them to be great actors."

He cited his role on a production of Enid Blyton's The Famous Five as an example of him working with a child cast.

Rupert Doswell, prosecuting, said Dowd's conversations with the "Chantelle" ended abruptly on January 15 last year, four days before he was arrested at a property in East Keswick, Leeds, at which point he said he lost his job.

He denies three counts of attempting to incite a child to engage in sexual activity, and a count of attempting to engage in sexual conversations with a child for the purpose of sexual gratification.

The trial is expected to conclude on Thursday.