The death of the convicted sex offender, actor and writer Chris Langham of pancreatic cancer at the age of 77 brings to an unhappy end one of the most turbulent public careers of any English entertainer. Langham was jailed for ten months in 2007 after having been found guilty of downloading and possessing level five child pornography, and while his sentence was reduced to six months on appeal, the taint of his conviction clung to him for the remainder of his life. 

The day the Today programme lost the plot

Who will remember Keir Starmer?

The Oxbridge files 2026: which schools get the most pupils in?

While Langham continued to deny that he had accessed the material for anything other than research purposes – and to make sense of the child abuse that he claimed that he had suffered in his youth – the judgement of Detective Superintendent Paul Fotheringham of Kent Police proved to be the lasting one. ‘Langham doesn’t like the label, but I am satisfied that he is a paedophile.’

Even at the time of Langham’s high-profile arrest, trial and subsequent conviction, there was a sense that the still very much alive Jimmy Savile was untouchable because of his litigious ways and ostentatious charitable initiatives – which, as we now know, were largely designed for him to have access to vulnerable children – and that the industry needed a high-profile celebrity scapegoat. 

It did not help that Langham was simultaneously accused of having had a sexual relationship with an underage girl, of which he was acquitted, but the sentencing remarks of........

© The Spectator