Emmerdale actor Mark Jordon has told a court he bit a pensioner’s face in “panic and fear” after being attacked by him.
The 54-year-old, who plays Daz Spencer in the soap, told his trial at Manchester’s Minshull Street Crown Court he had been attacked by 68-year-old Andrew Potts in the street in Oldham on July 1 following an earlier row in a beer garden.
Mr Potts has told the court Jordon bit him to the thumb, hand and eyebrow after threatening to kill him.
Giving evidence on Thursday, Jordon said Mr Potts, who had punched him in the nose during the row outside the Farrars Arms, kicked him in the groin and they both fell to the floor in the road.
He claimed Mr Potts had pulled at his hair and ears, then put his hand inside Jordon’s mouth, “fish hooking” him.
Jordon said he bit down on Mr Potts’s thumb as a “natural reaction” to having his hand inside his mouth.
The actor said he was then able to get up but Mr Potts fractured his wrist with a kick and the pair fell to the floor again.
Describing the moment when he bit Mr Potts’s eyebrow, he said: “Just sheer panic and fear and he had pulled me so close at one point I was worried I was going to get more injuries than I already had.
“It looked like he was snarling so I was worried he was maybe going to try to retaliate with a bite.
“I did exactly what he was going to do.
“It was not planned, regretful and in the moment. It was pure instinct.”
The court heard a row had started between Jordon and Mr Potts in the beer garden after comments were made about Jordon’s daughter Poppy, 18.
The former Heartbeat actor said he heard Mr Potts’s partner Rosalind O’Neill say she hoped his daughter used a condom after seeing her flirting with a boy.
He said he was “calm” when he spoke to Mrs O’Neill, who apologised, but claimed Mr Potts then called his fiancee Laura Norton, who plays Kerry Wyatt in Emmerdale, a “stupid f****** woman” and told her to shut up.
Jordon added: “He said that my daughter was being a slag.”
He said Mr Potts went on to say he had video of his daughter and would put it on YouTube.
Jordon told the court: “I asked him to delete it and I tried to go towards him to get to see the footage and to delete it from his phone.”
Mr Potts and Mrs O’Neill left the pub following the row but Jordon said he saw them walking back in that direction as he travelled home in a taxi a short while later and got out to approach them.
Miss Norton, 36, sat in the public gallery alongside former co-star Charlie Hardwick, who played Valerie Pollard in Emmerdale, as Jordon gave his evidence.
He was asked by Robert Smith, prosecuting, about CCTV footage of him being held back by Miss Norton as the row broke out in the beer garden.
He said: “She was trying to remind me I was on screen the next day.”
Asked about Mr Potts’s claims he had taken cocaine that evening, Jordon said: “It’s rubbish.”
The actor, of Tamewater Court, Dobcross, Oldham, denies affray, unlawfully wounding Mr Potts and the assault by beating of Mrs O’Neill.