London: A jury has begun deliberating whether Rolf Harris groped seven women, after an unusual break from legal protocol where the jury watched a video from a 1978 game show.
Judge Alistair McCreath called the jury back just minutes into their deliberations on allegations of six indecent assaults and one sexual assault by Harris on victims aged 12-42, from 1971 to 2004.
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Rolf Harris: Jury in trial retires
The jury in the 86-year-old's groping trial in London has retired to consider its verdicts. (Video courtesy: ABC News 24)
He confessed he had "stirred up a hornet's nest" while summarising evidence relating to one of the alleged indecent assaults, which took place at the filming of 'Star Games', a celebrity It's a Knockout clone shot in Cambridge.
Usually juries do not hear new evidence after they begin their deliberations.
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But in this case they watched ten minutes of the show's opening, a cheesy production in which celebrities such as the Monkees' Davy Jones and Doctor Who-to-be Colin Baker competed in athletics heats raising money for charity.
Rolf Harris captained the 'theatre team', which also included actress Rula Lenska, and the jury watched as they both lined up for a swimming competition.
The point was significant because Lenska had commented that she loved a morning swim - but Harris' accuser had said she was groped by him in a taxi on the way to the pool in the afternoon.
The judge had earlier told the jury it was "entirely speculative" that Rolf had swum at the same time as Lenska.
"Now we all know," the judge commented, after which he let the jury go home, to begin their deliberations again on Thursday morning at Southwark Crown Court in London.
Earlier on Wednesday Harris' barrister Stephen Vullo QC told the jury that a "media frenzy" during Harris' first trial in 2014 had made him "vulnerable to people making accusations against him".
"It's difficult to imagine a harder, faster or deeper fall from grace than that suffered by Rolf Harris," he said.
But on these new accusations he said the evidence fell short of proving his guilt, "sometimes by a million miles".
The judge in his legal directions to the jury told them that the defendant's previous convictions could show that Harris had a tendency to indecently assault young women and girls, but they "need to be careful. Just because someone has done a particular thing in the past… doesn't prove he has done it on this occasion. It supports the prosecution case but doesn't prove it".
He said Harris' decision not to take the witness stand meant the jury could conclude he had no answers to the accusations that would stand up to cross-examination.
The defence said Harris could not remember the events described by his accusers, but the judge asked "how do you know Mr Harris can't remember these events? The one person who could tell you is Mr Harris himself, and he hasn't."
Mr Harris attended court in suit and tie, sitting quietly in the dock except for two angry exclamations when evidence from his first trial was being read out to the jury.