Why Langham agreed to TV tell-all

Actor Chris Langham, the star of The Thick of It who spent three months in jail last year after being convicted of downloading indecent images of children from the internet, has told a Sunday paper that he regrets appearing on a special edition of the More4 show Shrink Rap, hosted by psychologist Dr Pamela Connolly, to be broadcast on January 14. So why did he do it?

The answer is that Dr Connolly and Langham have known each other for nearly 30 years. Long before she met and married Glaswegian comedian Billy Connolly, Dr Pamela was better known as Pamela Stephenson, Australian-born blonde bombshell star of Not the Nine O'Clock News, the BBC satirical sketch show that launched the careers of Rowan Atkinson, Mel Smith, Griff Rhys Jones and Stephenson herself.

Chris Langham starred in the first series of the show, broadcast in 1979, but was then dropped in favour of Griff Rhys Jones. It wasn't the end of the world for Langham: he went off to enjoy a very profitable stint as the writer of The Muppet Show. (Continued below)

When Stephenson/Connolly learned what had happened to Langham, she corresponded with him in jail and he agreed to follow Stephen Fry, Robin Williams and Sharon Osbourne among others onto Connolly's TV 'couch' as soon as he was released.

However, speaking to the Observer yesterday, Langham said of his upcoming appearance on the show: "I'm rather embarrassed by it now. I did it two days after my release and was very emotional."

Although Langham talks to Connolly about his conviction, his time in jail and about his own experience of child abuse as a young man, it was, according to insiders, the kindness of ordinary members of the public during his ordeal that drove him to tears during filming.

Meanwhile, Langham's wife Christine told the Observer that her husband had paid "a monumental price" for his "stupid' behaviour. "There are time when I've been angry," she said. "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?'" She added that she stands by her husband, but that she and he two children now had "a lot of adjustment to do".

Langham has always claimed that he viewed child pornography images from the internet as research for a new TV project. He told the Observer he had set out to write about the abuse he suffered as a child and had sought to look at the footage of other victims "to be able to tell their story and experience my own problems with it".

According to his wife, he "tried to look at four images" online. "This is not someone who has hundreds and thousands of them saved into little compartments on the computer," she added.