It’s a rustic cottage in the heart of the Garden of England, surrounded by seven acres of wild flower meadows and woodland teeming with butterflies, bats and swooping swifts and swallows.
The spacious home in Kent, which sleeps up to six people, is available on Airbnb from £250 a night, with the owners in another property on the grounds to help in the unlikely event of any hitches.
However, there is one curious aspect to this rental property that isn’t mentioned in the seductively worded listing. The owner in question is sex offender and former BBC star Chris Langham, 77, who starred in comedy sketch show Not The Nine O’Clock News before making his name in The Thick Of It.
Just days after winning a Bafta in 2006 for his role in the political satire as bumbling Labour minister Hugh Abbot, Langham was in court on sex offences.
He was charged with 15 counts of downloading indecent images, including clips that showed the rape of a teenager and the sexual abuse of an eight-year-old. He was sentenced to ten months in jail.
Just days after winning a Bafta in 2006 for his role in The Thick Of It as bumbling Labour minister Hugh Abbot, Chris Langham was in court on sex offences
The 77-year-old former BBC star’s home in Kent, which is now available on Airbnb from £250 a night
Despite his release from Kent’s Elmley Prison after serving just three months in 2007, Langham’s acting career was effectively over.
He made several abortive attempts to work again, starring in two low-budget films, but they both bombed, and former friends and colleagues, including casting directors, shunned him. Rejected by the showbiz world and out of work, Langham went to ground, retreating from the public eye to his large family home in Cranbrook, Kent.
And, as the Daily Mail can reveal, he is still there. Perhaps more remarkably, he is still with Chrissie, his theatre director second wife whom he had so publicly humiliated.
As well as standing by him during the court case, she later supported him financially when his acting work dried up. Now the couple have become Airbnb landlords.
The cottage they let was previously a home for Langham’s parents, Helen and Michael, so they could be close to him in their old age. But Michael, also an actor and director, died in 2011, while Helen died in 2018, leaving the property empty.
So Langham and Chrissie – best known for her work on the West End show Cats – decided to let it out on the popular app. The cottage is described as: ‘A cosy, light and spacious traditional oak-framed building with a minstrels’ gallery and a full height living area. Standing in seven acres of private grounds, on the path of an ancient but now forgotten travellers’ way [it] is surrounded by meadows, orchards and woodland walks.’
Pictures of its rustic interior have been posted along with brief biographic details of Langham, who’s described as a filmmaker, sailor and a ‘superhost’ (a highly rated Airbnb property owner).
A picture of a smiling Langham wearing a cap is accompanied by the description: ‘Born: in the 40s; I’m obsessed with: My boat.’
The cottage has a rating of 4.98 out of five and has generated 256 reviews, almost all positive, while Langham’s response rate to enquiries is listed as ‘100 per cent’.
The couple live in the main house, which Airbnb guests are warned is ‘out of bounds’.
Langham’s working life is now said to revolve around managing the property. When he’s not focused on the cottage or grounds, he is known to frequent a local gastropub and a shop from where he picks up most of his supplies. A short drive away is a marina where he keeps a boat which he takes out on the English Channel.
One local told the Daily Mail: ‘He’s a lovely man, always smiling and very funny. I don’t know much about his past, only that he was an actor and was once very famous. Most of his time now is spent running the cottage. It’s very popular with a lot of guests and it’s busy all year round.’
Another resident said: ‘He’s a genuinely nice man. I think he’s paid the price for what he did. You can’t continue to punish someone for their mistakes. And given what went on, he’s probably better off being an Airbnb host than returning to showbiz.’
Indeed, even before the scandal that ended his career, Langham never found fame easy.
After being picked as a joke writer for Spike Milligan and The Muppet Show, Langham made his break on Not The Nine O’Clock News in 1979 – before he was dropped because of his excessive drinking.
He was replaced by Griff Rhys Jones for the second series, a blow which saw him spiral into a cycle of drug and alcohol addiction. After checking into rehab and attending Alcoholics Anonymous, Langham landed his leading role in The Thick Of It – for which he was hailed a ‘genius’.
But then everything came crashing down. Weeks after season two had aired, Langham was arrested by Kent Police on November 29, 2005, accused of downloading child sex-abuse images – including ‘level five’ material, the most extreme category.
Langham argued in court that he’d downloaded the graphic material as part of research for a role as a sex offender in the BBC series Help, which he wrote and starred in alongside Paul Whitehouse.
He also told the jury he wanted to watch images of child abuse because he’d been raped by a family friend as a youngster, and wanted to understand more fully what he’d gone through.
During the police investigation, allegations emerged that he had groomed and repeatedly abused a 14-year-old girl who’d come to see him in the musical Les Misérables a decade earlier – but he was acquitted of these charges.
The judge had insisted: ‘Paedophilia is not an issue in this case – you are not a sexual predator.’ But a senior policeman who’d investigated Langham insisted to reporters outside court that he still thought the actor was a paedophile – an impression which has long stuck in the public mind.
Langham has two children with Chrissie and three with his first wife, actress Sue Jones-Davies. All are understood to have stood by him despite the scandal, as did his parents, and Langham’s children still regularly visit him.
A friend said: ‘In a strange way, it brought the family together because all of them went through a terrible time. They are still very protective over Chris and have gone through a lot, but it’s made them very close and loving towards each other. It’s been a tough few years for Chris but he’s got a lot of peace of mind, and I think he now enjoys the quiet, country life and running his Airbnb.’
When approached by the Daily Mail, Chrissie said that Langham did not wish to speak about his past and his life today as an Airbnb host.
