Woman claims Coronation Street actor's hands were everywhere as he groped her in his dressing room as a teenager

The Coronation Street actor Bill Roache had wandering hands "like an octopus", according to a woman who alleges he groped her in his dressing room when she was a teenager.

The woman, now 59, was molested by Roache at some point between June 1968 and October 1970 when she was under 16, Preston crown court heard. She is one of five women who claim he abused them in the 1960s and early 1970s.

In a police video played to the jury on Friday, the woman described how she and her younger sister used to hang around outside Granada Studios in Manchester, where the soap was filmed.

She said Roache, who has played Ken Barlow since the show began in 1960, would come out and talk to them and eventually got the sisters passes to tour the studios.

The woman said she was allowed to look inside the Rovers Return, Coronation Street's pub, before Roache took her into his dressing room. Her sister went off with another actor, Neville Buswell, who played Ray Langton, she told the jury. She said Roache was still in his stage makeup, including lipstick, with a very white face "like a ghost", when he suddenly assaulted her.

"He sort of came over to me and pressed himself against me. He touched both breasts over the clothing … He was like an octopus. Hands everywhere."

She claimed he tried to put his hands in her knickers and only stopped when she lied and said she was having her period. She said she did not tell her sister – who also claims she was abused by Roache on a separate occasion – about the alleged incident until a few weeks later. Afterwards, they referred to him as "The Roach", she said.

Last year, in the wake of the publicity surrounding sex allegations against BBC stars Jimmy Savile and Stuart Hall, she remembered saying to her sister: "I wonder if Ken Barlow is crapping himself".

She claimed the sisters decided to report the abuse to the police after hearing an interview with him. "I think I came out when The Roach made this comment about us being paid back for something you did in a previous life."

Another woman told the court on Friday that she had reported Roache for rape after hearing an interview with the brother of Cyril Smith, the late Lib Dem MP for Rochdale, who was accused after his death in 2010 of serious sexual abuse.

She said: "The thing that stirred me up was the interview that Cyril Smith's brother was giving following the taking down of his plaque following the revelations made against him.

"He had been stripped of his plaque and his brother was saying: 'Leave him alone, he's dead'. That is what annoyed me. He was saying his victims should just get on with it … basically saying the victims had no right to come forward. What gave him the right to say that about the victims?"

The woman, now 63, told the court she was a "gullible kid" who was raped twice in 1967 at the actor's then home in Lancashire when she was just 15.

She said she became depressed and took antidepressants from the age of 16 to 20.

She made clear she was not entirely blaming Roache for her mental illness, but said she "had major problems in the years following [the rapes]".

The woman said that she continued to watch Coronation Street after the alleged rapes. "There's no threat when he is on television," she said.

Roache, now 81, denies all the charges against him.

The case continues.

• This article was amended on 20 January 2014. An earlier version said that the late Cyril Smith was Labour, rather than Lib Dem, MP for Rochdale.