The comedian Paul Whitehouse told a jury yesterday that his co-writer Chris Langham had no need to download child pornography to research a character for a BBC programme that they were making together.

Mr Whitehouse, who collaborated with Mr Langham on Help, a comedy series about a psychiatrist and his patients, told Maidstone Crown Court that he had been unaware that his colleague was downloading illegal images as inspiration for the show.

The actor, who is best known for his appearances in The Fast Show, was called as a prosecution witness in the case against Mr Langham, 58, who is on trial for sexually assaulting an underage girl and downloading child pornography. Mr Langham denies all charges and claims that any material found on his computer was for research purposes.

Richard Barraclough, QC, for the prosecution, asked Mr Whitehouse whether he conducted any research for their characters. Mr Whitehouse replied: “None whatsoever. I don’t think we felt the need to. I certainly didn’t, anyway.” Asked whether Mr Langham had told him that he was visiting websites for research, he said: “Not to my knowledge.”

The two men wrote the first series in 2003 and were writing the second series when Mr Langham was arrested in November 2005 on suspicion of possessing illegal images. One of the characters in the second series, which was never filmed, was a sex offender called Pedro whose catchphrase was “I’m only a minor offender”.

Mr Whitehouse, 49, who created the character, read an extract of the script to the court in which Pedro confesses that he has been caught looking at women and girls in a park. “Some of them were adult women, some might have been younger,” he read. “What’s wrong with that? Juliet was 13, but everyone thinks that’s all right because it’s Shakespeare. I think Shakespeare’s a dirty old man. God sent this young girl to me as a temptation and I failed. God sent this young girl to tempt me, to test me. And I failed that test. He wanted me to fail the test like a sacrificial goat, so I would be a pariah.”

Mr Whitehouse told the eighth day of the trial that the character’s sexual history was deliberately ambiguous. “It was implied he was a peeping Tom or a flasher or possibly something worse,” he said.

Under cross-examination from David Whitehouse, QC, for the defence, the actor said that he resented being involved in the investigation. Asked whether he was angry that his name had been “dragged into this sordid affair”, he replied: “Yes.”

Another prosecution witness, Jane Berthoud, who commissioned Helpfor the BBC, said that she would not have approved of Mr Langham researching child pornography on the internet if he had asked her. “Nobody at the BBC would have approved such a thing for a comedy show,” she told the court.

She found out about Mr Langham’s arrest in December 2005, she said. “It was due to be in the papers the next day. Chris rang. It was quite a brief conversation. He was very distraught. He said, ‘I’m very sorry – I feel I’ve let you down’.”

Asked if she knew whether he had been arrested for allegedly downloading child pornography, she said: “I was aware he had been arrested for something in this area. I was shocked even then that he wasn’t denying it.”

She said that Mr Langham had confessed during a telephone conversation two weeks later that he had downloaded some disturbing images.

Mr Langham was said to have told the police that his life had fallen apart since his arrest. In his statement, read out in court, he described how his parents had moved out of their flat so that they could rent it to provide for him and his children. He said that his daughter had been reduced to tears by school bullies and that he had been asked not to attend his nine-year-old son’s football matches.

“Since my arrest, of course, my life has completely fallen apart,” he told the police. “Offers of work have almost entirely disappeared at a time when I was looking forward to something of a golden year.”

Mr Langham said that his son was suffering badly. “He keeps asking us [his parents] to stand together so he can put his arms around us both.”

After his arrest, Mr Langham was accused by a woman, who cannot be named for legal reasons, of having seduced her when she was 14. He has been charged with two serious sexual assaults, ten indecent assaults and 15 counts of downloading child pornography. The trial continues.

Screen lives

— Paul Whitehouse

2007 Ruddy Hell! It’s Harry and Paul (actor)

2005 Help (writer and actor)

2004 Swiss Toni (actor)

2004 Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (actor)

2001 Happiness (writer and actor)

2000 Randall & Hopkirk (Deceased) (writer and actor)

1994 The Fast Show (writer and actor)

1990 Harry Enfield’s Television Programme (writer and actor)

— Chris Langham

2006 Seven Second Delay (actor)

2006 The Art of Football from A to Z (writer)

2005 The Thick of It (actor)

2005 Help (actor and writer)

2004 The Worst Week of My Life (actor)

2001 Gimme, Gimme, Gimme (actor)

1999-2001 People Like Us (actor)

1996 Is It Legal? (actor)

1976-1981 The Muppet Show (writer)

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