Chris Langham, the star of the BBC’s The Thick of It, whose career came to an end when he was convicted of downloading and possessing child sexual abuse material, has died at the age of 77.
Langham’s death was confirmed via an obituary published in The Times, which said he died from pancreatic cancer on 24 June this year.
The London-born Langham first found success in the Seventies as a writer for Spike Milligan, and later as a performer and writer on the sketch show Not the Nine O’Clock News in 1979. He was dropped from the show amid an addiction to alcohol and cocaine. He was the sole British writer for the original The Muppet Show and also wrote for the TV satire Bremner, Bird and Fortune. He became a household name in 2005 via Armando Iannucci’s The Thick of It, which cast Langham as an inept cabinet member named Hugh Abbott.
Just days after winning a Bafta for his work on the show – for Best Comedy Performance – Langham was charged with 15 counts of downloading indecent images, including clips that showed the rape of a teenager and the sexual abuse of an eight-year-old.
“I did something terribly wrong,” he told The Independent in 2015. “I offended my community and I was punished, quite correctly, for being as stupid and arrogant as the judge described me to be.”
In 2007, Langham was convicted on charges of downloading child sexual abuse images and videos and was sentenced to 10 months in prison. He was ordered to be placed on the sex offenders’ register for a decade. His sentence was reduced to six months on appeal, partly motivated by Langham’s claim that he had viewed the sexual abuse images for research purposes. Upon release, Langham stated that his “conscience is clear” and complained that the media had “ignored” the court’s “acceptance based upon all the evidence and expert opinion that I have no sexual interest in children”.
Despite his release, a detective superintendent from Kent Police insisted to the press that Langham “is a paedophile”.
open image in galleryThe actor was dropped from The Thick of It in the wake of his initial arrest, with his character written out off-screen between seasons two and three.
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Langham claimed that he had viewed the child sexual abuse images while researching a psychotherapy comedy he was writing called Help, and also claimed that he was attempting to understand the sexual abuse he experienced as a child.
Asked by The Independent in 2015 why he viewed some of the videos multiple times, Langham replied: “That’s the unhealthy side of it. That’s the side of it that I need to be ashamed off. Doing it twice is a pattern. I was looking for something, I think. I found it in court, in the prison, in the sentence. Blunderingly, I stumbled on a solution for myself: which was to be shown clearly where I was wrong and clearly the other place in me that needed healing.”
He added that he “can’t condone one without the other”, saying “I’m sorry that I did it. I’m not justifying it or trying to explain it away, but those are the circumstances.”
open image in gallerySpeaking to The Guardian in 2011, he said that he had been ruined by “the big lie” that he was a paedophile. “That’s one of the things that I’ve struggled with forgiving. The judge stated really clearly that I’m not a paedophile – and then the policeman said afterwards that I was – and that’s what the press have run with ever since.”
He said he knew viewing and downloading child sexual abuse material was “illegal”, but that he believed he was “above the law because I’m an artist”. He continued: “I thought after [Help] I’ll reveal I’d researched it, and people would say gosh, you’ve taken this really difficult subject and done something amazing. I’ll do this thing, and everyone will think I’m wonderful. I thought if I pulled it off, everyone would admire me. And I’m a slut for approval.”
In the wake of his conviction, Langham worked sparingly, starring in short films and the independent mockumentary Black Pond. His final project was the gangster film Vengeance, which was shot in 2012 and not released until 2020.
Langham is survived by his second wife Christine Cartwright and their children Emily and James, and by three older children from his marriage to the actress Sue Jones-Davies, which ended in divorce.