'I've paid the price’ says comic

Chris Langham says he has received offers of work despite his conviction for downloading child pornography.

Talking about the ‘horrific’ consequences of downloading the 15 images, the comic says he has been left penniless after the two-year legal fight.

But he said he had been gratified by offers of work since his release and that his trial had been the ‘most therapeutic thing I've ever done’.

In his first interview since being released from jail last week after his ten-month sentence was cut to six, he said: ‘It is vile being in prison. It’s absolutely horrible.’

‘The people in the cells either side of me knew who I was, what I was in for, so there was a lot of banging on the walls and shouting abuse and threats and things.’

He told Sky News: ‘I had no right to have done it. It was completely wrong that I did it. There are no excuses for it.

‘It was arrogant of me to think that I was above the law. These are images that shouldn’t be seen by anybody – and I looked at them and I was wrong to; I’ve paid the price for that.’

The 58-year-old father-of-five repeated his defence that he had downloaded the videos of child rape for research into a character he was creating for the BBC Two comedy Help, which he co-created with Paul Whitehouse.

And he denied being a paedophile, saying: ‘There’s an assumption made if you looked at images like this, you must have a sexual interest in children. I just don’t have that it me. I don’t have a fibre of my being that is sexually interested in children.’

He said he only watched four of the 15 clips, and only for a few seconds ‘because I couldn't bear it. I found it too upsetting and distasteful and disturbing’.

Child protection campaigners said there was never any excuse for downloading such footage, which fuelled demand and led to more children being abused.

Click here to watch the interview.

Published: 20 Nov 2007