Chris Langham will never act on British television again, publicists predicted yesterday after the actor became the latest celebrity to be tainted with downloading child pornography.

Mark Borkowski, of Borkowski Public Relations, said that Langham would suffer a similar fate to Gary Glitter, the glam rock singer who was jailed for four months for possessing indecent images. “You can’t lift the very dark cloud that will follow his career,” he said.

He predicted that Langham would be able to continue his career as a writer, but would never appear in front of a camera again.

Max Clifford said that it was “nigh on impossible for him to work in television in Britain again” because of public revulsion at crimes against children. “He would have more chance if he had murdered someone.”

Langham is one of 7,000 people whose names were handed to British police after American authorities closed down a company that operated child pornography websites.

The British investigation, named Operation Ore, also found credit cards belonging to Paul Gadd – whose stage name is Gary Glitter – and Pete Townshend, the guitarist for The Who. Townshend, who claimed that he downloaded indecent images for research, was given a police caution and has since been rehabilitated.

Langham was found to have made two payments to Landslide Productions, an American company that ran websites containing adult pornography and images of child abuse, as far back as 1999. No images from those sites were found on Langham’s computer when police raided his home in November 2005, but officers found other footage that he downloaded using a file-sharing program.

Forensic experts found films of children being abused by adults including “level five” images, which depict torture. The footage was so disturbing that Judge Philip Statman, presiding, intervened so that the jury did not have to see more than three of the films. One female juror broke down in tears when the images were played in court.

Langham claimed that he downloaded the images so that he could confront an episode in his past, when he was sexually abused as a child. He said that he wanted to break down a door in his mind so that he could write about child abuse for Help, a television programme about a psychiatrist and his patients.

Life in focus

1949 Born April 14, 1949, in London
1957 Claims to have been sexually abused while on a sailing trip on Lake Ontario, Canada, near where he grew up
1960s Thrown out of university in second year for spending too little time on his studies
1972-74 Wrote for and performed in Spike Milligan’s shows Milligan In . . . and The Last Turkey in the Shop Show
1976-1981 Joined The Muppet Show as a writer, winning two awards from the American Writers’ Guild
1979 Joined Rowan Atkinson and Pamela Stephenson as part of the Not The Nine O’Clock News team but was replaced by Griff Rhys Jones after the first series because he did not fit in
1979 Appeared in Monty Python’s The Life of Brian as a centurion
1984 Joined Alcoholics Anonymous
1986 Wrote for Mel Smith and Griff Rhys Jones in Alas Smith and Jones
1989 Wrote and appeared in The Secret Policeman’s Biggest Ball, alongside Peter Cook, John Cleese, Kathy Burke, Robbie Coltrane, Ben Elton, Dawn French, Lenny Henry, Dudley Moore, Michael Palin, Willie Rushton and Jennifer Saunders
1998 Starred with Caroline Quentin and Amanda Holden in Kiss Me Kate, a sitcom set in a psychotherapy centre
1999 Wrote and performed with Rory Bremner, John Bird and John Fortune in Bremner, Bird and Fortune
1999-2001 Starred as Roy Mallard, an incompetent journalist, in People Like Us on Radio 4, later on BBC Two
2005 Wrote and starred in Help, a comedy programme about a therapist and his patients, who were all played by Paul Whitehouse
2005 Starred as Hugh Abbott, an incompetent government minister, in The Thick of It, for which he won a Bafta award

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