A fortnight ago, Christine Langham and her two children spent Christmas Day with a registered sex offender. They unwrapped their gifts in the presence of a man who had been found guilty of 15 counts of downloading indecent images of children. The video clips, which ranged in length from three seconds to six minutes, included the torture and rape of a teenage girl, the sexual abuse of a seven-year-old and an assault on a bound-and-gagged child of about 12.
Why were these two children spending Christmas with him? Because, as well as being guilty of these crimes, the man was their father, known to the wider world as actor and writer Chris Langham. He had been released from prison on appeal a month earlier, gaunt and pale, blinking into the flashlights of the waiting photographers. This was the first family Christmas for two years when Langham, 58, was legitimately allowed to be on his own with either of his children with Christine - Harry, 11, and Emily, 13.
'Clearly, I wouldn't still be here if I thought for one minute there was any risk to my children,' Christine says. 'I am incredibly protective of them.' She sits on a scuffed, pale-red sofa in one corner of the sitting room of the Langhams' large, comfortable farmhouse in Cranbrook, Kent. Beside her, the family cat is weaning a litter of five squirming kittens. Her husband of 24 years sits in an armchair by the stone hearth of a vast, open fire, which is emitting more smoke than heat.
This is the couple's first joint interview, and the first time Christine, 54, has ever spoken publicly about Langham's conviction or her decision to stand by him. A petite, pretty woman with cropped blonde hair and a smile that reaches the corner of her eyes, she speaks quietly but clearly, with a curious mixture of nervousness about how she might appear and certainty about what she believes. 'When it all came out, I said to the children, "What's the one thing that you know about Daddy?" and Harry said, "Well, he wouldn't hurt a fly."'
When her husband was found guilty of downloading child pornography last August, the public reaction was one of incredulity mixed with revulsion. It seemed bizarre that at the height of his professional success - Langham had just won a Bafta for his performance as the deluded minister Hugh Abbot in the BBC political satire The Thick of It - he should stake it all on satisfying a depraved sexual predilection.
It was somehow even more shocking that a man who made his living delivering well-crafted witticisms on prime-time television should have been guilty of such a distressing crime. Many of us assume that the people who download child pornography are disreputable outcasts living on the margins of society, with murky pasts and blighted futures. They are the misfits we can shut away in a box labelled 'otherness'. We do not expect them to be comfortably off, well-educated, middle-class professionals living in converted clapboard farmhouses in the bucolic English countryside.
And yet when the Kent police raided Langham's home in November 2005 at 6am, there, in a file marked 'incomplete' saved on the family computer, was graphic and irrefutable evidence of his guilt: 15 video clips, some of which were categorised by the police as 'Level Five', the most extreme type of pornography it is possible to download. When the milder images were shown to the jury at his trial last summer, one of the jurors apparently felt physically sick.
During the trial, Langham, a recovering alcoholic, claimed to have been abused himself by a friend of his parents who took him on a weekend sailing trip when he was eight and living in Canada. Langham's defence was that he had looked at the images as research for the BBC television series Help, co-written with comedian Paul Whitehouse, which featured a character whose catchphrase was: 'I'm only a minor offender, I only offend a minor.' He says now, as he did at the trial, that the character stirred up unpleasant memories of his own abuse, more than 50 years previously and the ingrained shame he felt over it. 'That's one of the problems we have dealing with this area,' he tells me. 'It's such a difficult area to discuss because the victims themselves find it hard to talk about.'
Why have the Langhams chosen to speak now, in this interview? 'I've always been a fairly private person,' says Christine, 'but even in remaining private, articles have been published that were lies from beginning to end.'
Langham adds: 'They said we'd split up while I was in prison. Well, that was news to us. It's terribly awkward because we want to be in a position to say, "Hang on, a lot of this is untrue." But it's difficult for Chrissie to know whether she's allowed to speak or whether that will simply attract more egg-throwing.'
It also seems to be part of a conscious attempt at rehabilitation, a tentative emergence from the shadows. Later this month, Langham will appear on More4's Shrink Rap, the programme where celebrities submit to being psychoanalysed by Pamela Stephenson in the glare of television cameras. 'I'm rather embarrassed by it now. I did it two days after my release and was very emotional.' He later admits, perhaps more pertinently, that one of his faults is being 'terribly dependent on the opinions of others'.
But while Langham is now at liberty to defend himself, the sexually abused children in those downloaded images have no such privilege, remaining the voiceless victims. By viewing those video clips - unwittingly or otherwise - Langham accepts he became part of the chain of abuse. Does he also accept that many people find his explanation for his actions, at best, incredible? 'Yes... no... I don't know. They must find the idea of being sexually aroused by children a lot more natural than I do. I find it hard to believe anyone would look at this unless it was for research.
'There are some things that it's very important that I clearly say, and one of them is that I'm absolutely clear that what I did was wrong. It never occurred to me that what I was doing was in any way offensive to other victims of sexual abuse. But it has been made clear to me that I have been and I am sorry for that.
'I felt at the time - I don't want to say justified - informed by the desire to tell our story, for those kids that had been abused. I never had anything other than a sense of respect or compassion for the children in the images. I wanted to be able to tell their story and experience my own problems with it.
'One of the reasons I wanted to write about it was to create some debate. For every unfortunate child whose image is on the internet, thousands are being abused within their own homes who we know nothing about.
'If you look at a photograph of Holocaust victims, as we were encouraged to do at school, that wasn't because they wanted us to go out and be anti-semitic.'
'It's to have compassion,' says Christine.
'Exactly.'
The jury took three hours to convict Langham, although he was acquitted of the more serious charge of an alleged indecent assault on a 14-year-old girl. Sentencing him to 10 months in prison, later cut down to six on appeal, Judge Philip Statman said the children in the images had been subjected to 'horrifying sexual abuse' and that it would be 'a misplaced kindness' to award bail.
Throughout the trial, Christine made no public pronouncements, nor did she appear in court. Instead, she concentrated on looking after the couple's two children, protecting them from questions shouted by journalists standing at the end of the gravel driveway and shielding them, as far as she could, from the brutal headlines of each day's front pages. She carried on her work as a theatrical music director - professionally she is known as Christine Cartwright - so that she could pay the mortgage on a single income. 'We're holding on by the skin of our teeth at the moment financially, with Chris not having worked for two years,' she says. 'Any resources we had, there's nothing now. We're trying to hold on to the house but we could lose it.'
Although her soft voice and quiet manner may at first suggest submissiveness, it becomes clear in talking to her that she is a woman who has great strength of character. Why did she stand by her husband? 'We had to talk about it quite thoroughly for me to understand it. But I think I know him so well. I did have to, initially, look at the gravity of the situation and really examine it, but I didn't ever disbelieve or distrust Chris.
'We've had situations where Chris has been so over-protective of children that he'll step in. In supermarkets, if he sees someone verbally abusing a child, it triggers something in him. Whereas I would say, "Oh, let's just leave it", he has to do something - he can't bear the verbal, physical or emotional abuse of a child.'
Langham explained what happened for his wife as he explains it to me now, clearly, without flinching, occasionally standing up from his armchair and walking around the room in a state of contained agitation. He is more than six feet tall and his head almost skims the low ceiling. He answers all my questions, maintaining a level, lugubrious gaze through his glasses. He says he never entered his credit card details online, as was erroneously stated by the trial judge in his summation (this was one of the reasons Langham's appeal was upheld) but that in 1999 he had paid by credit card to access an adult pornographic site. These credit card details were on police record and enabled them to continue trawling through his computer files. Langham says that in January 2005 he searched for the clips in question on a free file-sharing website. He found 15 files but only looked at the first few seconds of four of them. The others continued to download on his computer, he says, without his knowledge. There were no warning banners to alert him to the nature of the videos, although their names did contain terms such as 'Lolita', 'incest', 'rape', 'whore' and 'hussy'.
'But I couldn't look at them. I tried four times to look at them and I didn't. I could press the stop button. I had the luxury that they didn't have. I felt guilty about that at the time, that I didn't even have the stomach to witness it for them. I feel shabby for that.'
Did he know, when he clicked the onscreen 'play' button, that what he was doing was illegal? 'Well, this is what I mean about not thinking things through. If you really thought about it, it probably is and, anyway, why take the risk? I thought: I'm doing this for reasons beyond reproach, I'm a lovely guy... it was really stupid and arrogant to believe that, because I think I'm doing something good, I think I'm outside the law.'
He says, when I pose the inevitable question, that he was 'absolutely not' aroused by what he saw.
'There are times I have been angry,' admits Christine. 'I've said to him, "Did you not think first?" I know it's not about him having any sexual entertainment out of these images, but I did say, "For someone so intelligent, why were you so stupid?" I just wouldn't press the button. I'd think, "Hang on, what if...?"'
They were, she says, 'totally unprepared' for the prison term - Langham's lawyers had led them to believe the worst-case scenario would be a suspended sentence. The police investigation, conducted under the remit of Operation Ore, had taken two years, during which time Langham had been living in a curious sort of limbo, forbidden to be alone with Harry and Emily, then aged nine and 11.
'That was the worst thing,' he says. 'If Emily had a nightmare, I wasn't allowed to go into her room and say it was all right.'
He says he felt suicidal in January 2006, just after the story broke in the press. Did Christine ever feel the same? 'No. I just don't go there. My lowest point came and went over the two years. There's a long period of having it hanging over you. The police kept putting things back because they weren't ready. I wrote to them and said, "Please don't prolong this any longer because this is an abuse of my children." They didn't acknowledge it.'
Yet however horrible it has been for them, how much worse must it have been for the children in those downloaded files on Langham's computer? 'I'm aware that it's selfish of me to talk about my own experiences,' he says, 'because what about those kids who were abused just by my looking at them?'
In court, two medical experts told the jury that Langham was not a paedophile and did not present a danger to children. 'If I was a paedophile, someone would have noticed, surely? I've got 30 years of having children [he has three grown-up sons from his first marriage to actress Sue Jones Davies]. The only area in which I feel absolutely confident about myself is as a father. I'm a good daddy. I'm a safe place.'
On the advice of a child psychiatrist, the Langhams told Emily and Harry that 'Daddy had looked at pictures of people being hurt', and say they were careful to explain as much as they could, in terms the children could understand. Both children are delightful, engaging company. Harry visited his father in Elmley prison on the Isle of Sheppey, although the children preferred to call it 'Land of Milk and Cookies' or 'LOMAC' because it made it seem less frightening.
It has clearly been a draining time for the whole family. After a family outing to the theatre in the week before Christmas, Emily had a nightmare about everyone in the audience turning to stare at her father. 'The children were shocked by it [the conviction] and upset, and they asked a lot of questions,' says Christine. 'I said to them what we've always said, which is that we're never given more than we can handle. That means we're strong enough. They've always felt, I think, that together we can do it.'
For the first six weeks in prison, Langham was not allowed any contact with or photos of his children 'in case I was aroused'. He says prison was 'vile', although he agrees that he deserved the sentence and says he was never physically attacked. 'It started from when I got taken downstairs from the courtroom and I was put in a truck with a load of other prisoners. The guy in the cubicle behind me started knocking on the dividing wall and said, "Chris, is that you? Is that you?" in this nice, quiet voice. I said yes, then it was bang, bang, bang, "You fucking nonce. You're never going to get out of here alive."'
Even now, released from his cell, Christine feels that her husband is still being unjustly punished. He is not allowed an email address or a mobile phone with access to the internet and they have found it almost impossible to get car or home contents insurance because many companies refuse to cover sex offenders against accidental or malicious damage. 'I just feel it's a monumental price to pay for someone having tried to look at four images,' she says. 'This is not someone who has hundreds of thousands of them saved into little compartments on the computer.'
Does she still love him? There is a pause. 'We've got a lot of adjustment to do,' she says, carefully. 'It's stressful being around the situation. Chris is quite low and things happen... it's hard to pick yourself up. So we're having to deal with that.'
Although he is sitting in the same room, listening attentively to what his wife is saying, Langham does not respond. It is only later, as he is driving me back to the station, that he admits he feels 'awful guilt' about what he has put his family through. 'I think I've been a rubbish husband, a rubbish father,' he says, one hand clenched tightly on the steering wheel.
When we get to the station, there is a young woman in the ticket office, standing in front of the window, looking out at the car park. She catches sight of Langham from behind the glass. Her face flickers in recognition. 'Here we go,' he says, grimly. She stares at him, unblinking, for what cannot be more than a few seconds. Yet it feels uncomfortably prolonged and the silent accusation lingers on, long after the next train pulls in.
Rise and fall: Chris Langham's turbulent life
Born 14 April 1949 in London. He claims to have been sexually abused by a friend of his parents at the age of eight.
Career
1972
Got his first break writing for Spike Milligan.
1976-1981 Worked on The Muppet Show, for which he won two awards from the Writers' Guild of America.
1979 Appeared in the pilot and first full series of Not the Nine O'Clock News. Left before the second series battling alcohol and cocaine addiction.
1979 Appeared in Monty Python's The Life of Brian as a centurion.
1999 Wrote and performed in Bremner, Bird and Fortune.
2005 Won a Bafta for role as a bungling government minister in The Thick of It
Personal life
Married twice, with three grown-up sons by his first marriage and a son and daughter by his current marriage.
Turmoil
November 2005 Arrested at his Kent home by police investigating internet child pornography.
May 2006 Charged with 15 counts of downloading indecent images of children.
September 2006 Charged with indecent assault and serious sexual assault on a 14-year-old girl who met Langham while he was performing in Les Miserables in the mid-Nineties.
August 2007 Convicted on the 15 internet pornography charges but cleared of assaulting the teenage fan.
November 2007 Released from jail after winning an appeal against the severity of his 10-month sentence.
He says 'My life has been ruined but my conscience is clear. I was wrong... but I believe the price I have been asked to pay is out of all proportion.'
Ally Carnwath