Les Carter was a tenacious journalist on the Weatherfield Gazette who picked up a story that women from Weatherfield had behaved badly on a trade exchange visit with the citizens of Charleville in France. He traced the story to Coronation Street where Bet Lynch told him that all the women she knew who were on the trip were happily married. He parried with “Isn’t it the bible that says never give a wicked woman the liberty to gad abroad?”, amusing Bet.
He then went into Baldwin's Casuals where guilty parties Vera Duckworth and Ivy Tilsley refused to help and Mike Baldwin pointed him in direction of Hilda Ogden for his story. He told Alf Roberts that he tried to get information from the Mayor but couldn’t get past his secretary. In desperation, he rang France and spoke to a journalist colleague in Charleville from where he obtained the story of the women leaving an official dinner to party outside with a group of ex-paras. They ended up playing football in the road with the hat of a gendarme who had been called out to see what the commotion was about and a pair of women’s knickers (Vera’s) was hoisted up a flagpole. A slightly blurred photograph was also supplied which Bet claimed to Carter showed no one she knew, although she confessed to Betty Turpin that one definitely looked like Ivy. After giving Ivy one last chance to give her side of the story, Bert Tilsley chased him away. Ivy hoped that was the end of the matter but the story ended up in the Gazette anyway. It puzzled Stan Ogden though - why would anyone go after Hilda when they had all those gorgeous French women there for the taking?
- Ian Redford played the role of Carter, twenty-five years before appearing as regular character Keith Appleyard.