A FORMER teacher from Workington showed a pornographic video to a teenage boy who had turned to him for advice on acting, a jury heard.

The alleged victim - now an adult - was the second person to testify at Carlisle Crown Court as the trial of pensioner Paul Stuart Adams, 74, went into its third day. The pensioner denies 15 sexual offences.

The charges include multiple child sex offences, including a specimen charge alleging that he paid another boy for sexual services that included the teenager stripping naked and allowing Adams to spank him.

The jury was yesterday shown a video-recorded interview of the second alleged victim, who contacted the police after a report about the defendant’s court case appeared in the News & Star.

In his police interview, the man said he was 15 when he began visiting Adams, who was heavily involved in the local theatres and was offering him advice about acting. “He used to be a teacher,” said the man.

Adams was also into music and recording and had his own recording studio in the loft of his home in Workington. “I was interested in all of these things,” said the man.

He told the jury that Adams would offer him beer when he was at his house. As a 15-year-old, he said, he was “quite polite” and “naive.”

He told the jury that Adams told him he kissed his friends on the lips.

The pensioner – whose wife was never in when he visited – had then taken him into his loft studio and shown him a pornographic video, including one which involved men being spanked.

The man continued: “He would talk about sex a lot. He would talk about the sex he had when he was younger. It was quite confusing.” He then described an occasion when Adams had, he said, attempted to “force himself” on him during a car journey after the pensioner parked in a layby.

“I was asking him to stop,” said the man. He recalled also an occasion after he had left the area when Adams sent him some of his underwear. "I just put it in the bin," said the man.

In earlier evidence, the mother of the first alleged victim told the jury that her son had arrived at her door at 10.30pm and was “crying his eyes out.” She said he had sunk to the floor and put his head in his hands.

“He was crying and shaking, and I put my arms round him to comfort him,” she said. After a little while, he told her that Adams had been paying him to let him touch him, said the woman.

“It was the last thing I expected,” she said. “I didn’t disbelieve [my son] but it was a shock… He didn’t want anyone to know; he was very ashamed.” It was the “shame factor” that had stopped him teller her sooner, she said.

Her son had earlier told the jury that he was addicted to drugs when Adams sexually abused him. The alleged victim said the main desire Adams had was for “spanking.”

Defence barrister Richard Dawson suggested he had invented the allegations because Adams had begun to challenge him, including on an occasion when he had produced a knife from his sock.

The man said that never happened and later added: “I believe in my heart of hearts that given the opportunity he would still be sexually abusing me now, but maybe I am too old for him now.”

Mr Dawson said Adams had only ever agreed once to spank the then boy at his request, it was consensual. Adams had sought to do nothing more than offer the then boy “guidance and mentoring.”

Six of the 15 charges faced by the defendant, of Banklands, Workington, relate to two 'child' victims – either paying a child for sexual services – or indecent assaults on a child; and three of those five charges are specimen counts relating to multiple alleged incidents.

The trial continues.