Chris Langham says he has nothing to be ashamed of

Chris Langham has revealed he has nothing to be ashamed of after being found guilty of downloading child porn.

The disgraced TV star said his ordeal means nothing now - because it has helped him to discover who he really is.

"I know who I am so it doesn't matter what anyone says," he said. "Of course it's inconvenient and it hurts my children but I know who I am and I have nothing to be ashamed of."

He admitted he was wrong to download explicit pictures of children being abused and believed he only did it to try and help people better understand the issues of child abuse and paedophilia.

"As far as the images are concerned, the arrest, the trial, the imprisonment, I was really stupid. I was really arrogant, wilful, pig-headed," he confessed.

"I had a romantic notion that it was a wonderful thing I was doing, that I would write this piece that would move people and make a difference, but it was just arrogance on my part. But none of it means anything because I know who I am now."

Langham was sentenced to ten months in prison for downloading child pornography, but was released on appeal after serving just three and a half months.

In a frank interview with psychologist Pamela Connolly, Langham, 58, revealed his life spiralled out of control after he was abused at the age of eight by a friend of an actor his parents knew.

"A guy offered to take me away sailing for a weekend. He used to take kids away on weekends sailing and they let me go with him, just me on my own," he said.

"The thing I remember worst and most of all was not a moment of sexual penetration but of lying with him in bed afterwards with his arm around me and him telling me I had done well and the thing I felt most ashamed of was thinking that's ok then because he was pleased with me."

Speaking about his drink and drug addiction, the troubled actor broke down in tears when he confessed he had once used a family death as an excuse to score a gram of cocaine.

"I watched myself do dreadful things, we had a baby that died during delivery, the cord was wrapped around the baby's neck and she strangled," he said.

"I left my wife in a ward full of mothers with living babies to go to a dealer's and say 'you've got to give me a gram on credit because my baby just died' that's where my using took me. That, to me, the death of my daughter was an opportunity to get a gram on credit. I can always go back to that place and I don't want to be that person anymore."

Langham then spoke about his arrest and how officers forced him to look at the pictures he had downloaded.

"I couldn't bare it, I felt like I was having my nose rubbed in someone else's vomit, I found it disturbing and upsetting," he said on More4's Shrink Rap.

But despite feeling sick, the comedian said he felt courageous for looking at each image. "What I did was wrong, it was against the law but if these children could endure what they had to endure when these images were created then at least I could have the courage to sit there and watch it," he said.

Despite his conviction, Langham still believed he was trying to do a good thing by downloading the images and maintained he did this as research for a new show he was writing.

"I, like all of us, think it's a fascinating subject. It's terrifying yet riveting it's a worse taboo than murder," he said.

"Yet I hoped in a middle class way that by writing about the reality of it in the world we live in that somehow I would be able to ventilate the subject in a way that would make people talk about it more and understand it more."

By Owen Williams, Jan 16 2008 © Copyright 2008 - Showbiz Spy