THE actor Chris Langham, 58 and a father of five, has been jailed for 10 months, of which he will serve five, minus the 43 days he has spent in custody, for downloading child pornography.

A jury convicted him last month of 15 counts of making indecent images of children. He was cleared of indecent assault charges involving a teenage female fan.

Although the actor broke down as his sentence was read out - he might take comfort from the fact that quite a few people will find his distress nearly as pleasing as he may have found the distress of abused children - his legal team was upbeat afterwards.

Outside court Angus McBride, Langham’s solicitor, read a statement on Langham’s behalf. It said: “The court has confirmed . . . that I am not a paedophile. It has reached this conclusion having considered reports by social services, the probation service, a senior consultant psychiatrist and an expert in sexual offenders with 30 years’ experience. If the prosecution had accepted this at the beginning I would have pleaded guilty. I have always admitted I should never have downloaded those abusive images. I am delighted that at last my account has been proved to be the truth.”

Not so fast, mate. Langham may, like most perverts, not believe he has a problem, but that doesn’t mean the rest of us have to engage with his delusion. “He doesn’t like the label, but I am satisfied that he is a paedophile,” commented DCI Paul Fotheringham of Kent police.

The images found on Langham’s computer were classified as “category 5”, the worst it gets. They had names such as “bondage 11-year-old”, “Philippine child prostitute”, “incest”, “rape”, “whore” and “hussy”. Two clips showed an eight-year-old girl tied up and sexually abused by her father. There was also evidence that Langham had tried and failed to download many other videos.

Langham used the pathetic defence that he was “researching a role” for an episode of the BBC2 show Help. Isn’t the point of actors that they are able to, well, act? Did Langham, who most recently starred in The Thick of It, a political sitcom, hang around taking politicians out to dinner for three years to “research” his role (and satirise politicians all you like, but not one of them has ever been accused of sinking as low as Langham, a nice arty liberal)?

The actor also claimed that he had been abused as a boy, although he wasn’t forthcoming with the detail. Really? Well, I broke my leg when I was nine and I don’t feel the need to watch car crashes to remind myself of what it felt like. This is a craven excuse for wickedness.

I love the internet and spend hours a day on it. But there is a serious problem with much of its sexual content and it’s of such magnitude that even swoops like Operation Ore, the international police investigation, can only ever touch the tip of the iceberg. A person viewing material such as Langham’s online exists in a strange half-place: the stuff he is watching is real, and he is real, but all he has to do to make it stop is turn his laptop off and go and make a cup of tea.

What feels more real - the sight of children being raped far away or the familiar mug and teabag? This also applies to those kind of terrorist-friendly websites that show you how best to make a bomb or detonate yourself: you watch one and then go out with your mates and get a pizza.

The fact that your 10 minutes of madness - where you contemplated the merits of child rape or mass murder - doesn’t feel real does not mean it doesn’t exist, or that you are absolved the second you switch off the computer. The whole subject is incredibly murky - Orwellian, actually, because it’s to do with thought crime. Is it right to punish people because they have had a violent or revolting thought? Don’t we all have thoughts that would strike other people as revolting?

In Langham’s case it is very right indeed and I wish he’d got a longer sentence. You don’t need me to spell out to you the misery that innocent children endure because some disgusting maladjusted freak appears to enjoy watching them being abused. There are, as we know, a growing number of these children and the internet plays an enormous part in this. What used to remain a nebulous sexual fantasy, locked away in the head of the person having it, can now be made flesh in about three minutes. There is a huge difference between vaguely thinking something and having it acted out for your delectation.

Again, the same applies to embryonic terrorists: if, 10 years ago, you fancied blowing up strangers on the underground and were not a member of a terrorist organisation, the thought would probably remain just that, a thought. There weren’t any manuals in your local bookshop, you could hardly ask around at work and so you were left a wannabe detonator until, hopefully, you got a life. Today you Google, order supplies online and wham - literally.

I understand the discomfort that many people feel about thought crime, with its McCarthyesque overtones and its alarming whiff of smug moral superiority; nobody likes censorship. But there are some things that nobody thinks are right and killing innocent people and raping children are at the top of the list.

We may be tempted to have a peek citing, like Langham, “curiosity” as an excuse to view material that nobody should view - celebrity corpses, death, rape, abuse. Young boys in particular, egged on by those embarrassing lads’ magazines, think there is something fun and impressive about subjecting their poor young souls to images of degradation.

Take that a little bit further and you have Abu Ghraib, where many of the indignities perpetrated on Iraqi prisoners, combining humiliation and genitalia, were entirely familiar to a regular viewer of internet porn.

Its influence is also strongly felt in many recent rape and/or abduction cases. Unlike the magazine stuff, the majority of online porn really hates women and there are entire, massively popular genres dedicated to their nonconsensual violation and humiliation. Women, children, terror: all these things matter and they matter enormously if we are in any way interested in mending our “broken society”.

Yet people - and governments - shrug their shoulders and say that yes, there’s a lot of horrible stuff out there but there you go. Mightn’t it be time to actually do something about it?

india.knight@sunday-times.co.uk

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