Langham wins appeal

Bafta award-winning comedy actor and writer Chris Langham, most recently famed for starring in Armando Iannucci's The Thick of It, was released from prison today, after a successful appeal.

Earlier in the year, Langham was convicted and sentenced to 10 months in prison for 15 counts of downloading child pornography from the Internet. His arrest came in November 2005, when police found pornographic photographs of children at the star's Kent home.

Langham claimed at trial that he had downloaded the images in an attempt to make sense of the sexual abuse he suffered as a child, and as research for the hit BBC Two sitcom of earlier that same year, Help. In the programme, which he co-wrote and starred in alongside Paul Whitehouse, he played a psychotherapist conducting therapy sessions, one of whose patients was a paedophile.

Langham had been due for release in early 2008, but today's successful case at the Court of Appeal means that his sentence has been cut by four months. An earlier attempt at appeal was unsuccessful.

As he left prison the actor told reporters: "My life has been ruined but my conscience is clear."