Comedy star Chris Langham 'downloaded video of teenage girl being raped'

The award-winning comedy actor Chris Langham had a video clip of a teenage girl being raped by three men on his laptop computer, a court has heard.

Langham, recognised for his work in "The Thick of It" and "Help", also saved and watched movie files of 11-year-old girls being raped by adults and having sex with underage boys.

They featured children from Brazil, the Philippines and France, and were downloaded with file-sharing software Limewire from the internet.

Many of the video clips were labelled "pre-teen hardcore" and "Lolita pre-teen rape".

Langham claims he downloaded some images for research purposes ahead of playing a psychiatrist treating a paedophile in the BBC TV series "Help".

Paul Whitehouse, who played the paedophile, is expected to give evidence later today.

All of the child pornography films had files names describing vividly what they contained which Langham would have read before downloading the clips, Maidstone Crown Court heard

Kent Police computer expert Christopher Crute told jurors how the obscene material was recovered from the 58-year-old's home.

Mr Crute said file names made reference to children as young as seven while some included the words Lolita, incest, rape, whore and hussy.

He also explained to the jury at Maidstone Crown Court that the acronym PTHC on some of the files meant "pre-teen hardcore".

Scroll down for more ...

The files had been downloaded from the internet to an Apple laptop computer on November 28 2005 at around 11pm.

The laptop was recovered, along with a desktop computer and an external disk drive, at Langham's home in Golford, near Cranbrook, Kent.

Before the jury was told about the files, Judge Philip Statman warned them: "It is vital that when you look at that which you are about to see, which you will find graphic, you take a cool, calm and dispassionate view of this evidence."

Langham, 58, denies 15 counts of making an indecent photograph of a child between September and November 2005. He also denies 10 counts of indecent assault and two counts of buggery between January 1996 and April 2000.

His alleged victim claimed the actor took her virginity in a London hotel room when she was 14.

She has told the jury that Langham claimed that looking at child pornography on the internet made him feel like a "better man".

His defence counsel, David Whitehouse QC, said his client downloaded the images for research purposes while writing the BBC drama Help.

One of the episodes Langham wrote involved a paedophile being seen by his psychiatrist character. Comedy star Paul Whitehouse is expected to give evidence later today.

He appeared with Langham in Help, playing different patients seen by a psychiatrist played by Langham