Actor fired in Chris Langham theatre spat

Chris Langham, the comic actor and writer who spent 10 months in jail for downloading child pornography, secretly helped rewrite a West End play about the rock musician Ian Dury last year. The news became public today when it was revealed by the London Evening Standard that he had fallen out with one of the actors, Jud Charlton, over changes in the script.

The alterations Langham made to the play, Hit Me! The Life And Rhymes Of Ian Dury, did not meet with Charlton's approval. The pair rowed, and the show's producers, siding with Langham, sacked the actor.

Charlton, 40, told the Standard: "I was very unhappy with the script that Chris Langham wrote. I had an argument with him, and he questioned my reputation, which I thought was completely hypocritical.

"It was mind-blowing that he couldn't see the irony, given his past. I made it clear that I didn't want to work with him and his new script, which I thought was disrespectful to Ian Dury, and for that I was sacked."

The show, which tells the story of the Blockheads singer who died of cancer in 2000, transferred to the Leicester Square Theatre this week after a successful run at the Courtyard Theatre in Shoreditch.

Irving Rappaport, the producer, brought in Langham last month to work with the show's original writer and director Jeff Merrifield. Several key people associated are said to have objected to the move.

Charlton said: "After I said that I wouldn't work with Chris, straight away Jeff Merrifield and Irving Rappaport talked about recasting the part. I spent Christmas trying to get the show back to what it was, but couldn't work with Chris Langham over what he had written. It simply didn't work and he added all these crude jokes. What was a celebration of Ian Dury and the Blockheads has turned into a character assassination."