Chris Langham

BBC puts comedy starring convicted child sex offender on iPlayer

Victims group questions promotion of The Thick Of It starring Chris Langham, who was jailed for downloading child sexual abuse content.

Spike Milligan has been purged but Muppets aren't woke

Forty-five years after it first aired on television, all five series of The Muppet Show are now available on Disney+. The series - which is known for its madcap comedy skits and celebrity guest stars - has lost none of its magic, like a healthy wallop of felt-based nostalgia. All the gang are together: Kermit the Frog, Miss Piggy, Fozzie Bear, Swedish Chef, Gonzo. (And it's the gang at their very best, when they were controlled by the genius of Jim Henson - before Disney got its mousey, corporate claws into them.)

But noticeable by their absence are some of the Muppets' celebrity guests, including Chris Langham - an understandable omission from the family-focused streaming platform - and Spike Milligan, both of whose episodes are missing from the Disney+ collection.

Not the Nine O'Clock News at 40

The BBC sketch show not only kick-started 'alternative comedy' and some of the most influential careers in British comedy, writes Gerard Gilbert, but also the second great age of TV satire.

Flowers review

Having previously co-written and co-directed the acclaimed indie film Black Pond, one of Chris Langham's few projects since his downfall, Will Sharpe can rightly stake a claim to be a genuine comedy auteur on the back of this original and compelling work.

Chris Langham interview: disgraced actor opens up

Disgraced actor opens up about his child sex abuse images conviction and why he's making a film in an orphanage.

A tiny cult is growing around this bewitching British oddity. It's a strange, disorientating mock-documentary about a middle-class family who are accused of murder. Their apparent 'victim' is an odd stranger who the father (Chris Langham, the disgraced star of The Thick Of It) meets while walking his three-legged dog next to a local pond. A melancholic Langham is wonderfully underplayed, in contrast to comedian Simon Amstell's overpoweringly wacky psychotherapist. The first feature by twentysomethings Will Sharpe and Tom Kingsley, it scored several awards and a Bafta nomination - not bad for a self-distributed debut made for just £25,000.

Black Pond: Chris Langham was our ideal casting choice

Young directors Tom Kingsley and Will Sharpe's debut feature-length film starred Chris Langham in his first role after prison. They explain to Daisy Bowie-Sell why casting him was the best possible decision.

Something in the water

It's brilliant. It's recognisably a British take on suburban, middle-class manners and media exploitation, and the familiar if unusually-cast faces of Chris Langham and Simon Amstell also give you something to go on, but Black Pond is not your average film.

What an intriguing, and unsettling little movie Black Pond (2011, Black Pond, 15) is. At the Baftas its makers (director Tom Kingsley, writer/director Will Sharpe and producer Sarah Brocklehurst) were nominated for an outstanding debut award, and there is plenty here to suggest that they are an ever-so-slightly surreal force to be reckoned with. The story of a family who unwittingly achieve tabloid notoriety as a killer clan, the film mixes faux documentary interviews with off-kilter (and carefully coloured) scenes from a waking dream of life, interspersed with animated legends of lost ladies of the lake and three-legged dogs. It's peculiar stuff, occasionally funny, often poignantly uncomfortable, and consistently weird, like some subdued English relative of David Lynch's American gothic oeuvre. Chris Langham and Amanda Hadingue provide a suitably awkward mainstay as the collapsing couple at the centre of the drama, although Simon Amstell appears occasionally to have wandered in from a different (and more overtly comedic) movie as a madcap phoney shrink taunting Sharpe's mockable Tim. Extras include deleted scenes and the Sharpe/Kingsley short film Cockroach.