Today's Birthdays

one click shows all of today's celebrity birthdays

Browse All Birthdays

43,625    Actors
27,931    Actresses
4,867    Composers
7,058    Directors
842    Footballers
221    Racing drivers
925    Singers
9,111    Writers

Get FamousLikeMe on your website
One line of code gets FamousLikeMe on your website. Find out more.

Subscribe to Daily updates


Add to Google

privacy policy



Famous Like Me > Actor > L > Chris Langham

Profile of Chris Langham on Famous Like Me

 
Name: Chris Langham  
   
Also Know As:
   
Date of Birth: 14th April 1949
   
Place of Birth: London, England, UK
   
Profession: Actor
 
 
From Wikipedia, the free Encyclopedia

Chris Langham (born 14 April 1949) is a British writer and comedian. He is most famous for playing presenter Roy Mallard in People Like Us, first on BBC Radio 4 and later on its transfer to television on BBC 2, where Mallard is almost entirely an unseen character. He subsequently created several spoof adverts in the same vein.

One of Langham's earliest breaks was as the sole British writer for The Muppet Show. He also appeared as the "special guest star" in the thirteenth episode of the final season (1980-81), when scheduled guest Richard Pryor was unable to make it to the recording; a script was hastily written in which "Chris the Delivery Boy" stood in for an absent celebrity.

Langham was part of the original team for Not The Nine O'Clock News in 1979, and even after the original pilot was pulled from the schedules he was retained for the first full series, billed equally with the then unknown Mel Smith, Pamela Stephenson and Rowan Atkinson. The first series did not rate as well as hoped, however, and it was felt that Langham "didn't quite fit in", so he was replaced by support player Griff Rhys Jones. Langham did not learn of the switch until the last day of filming when he heard the crew discussing the second series. Langham had already problems with substance abuse and the sacking worsened this situation. The show only achieved cult status during its later series, and in subsequent compilation repeats most of Langham's contributions have been cut, giving the impression that he was never a main cast member. This impression not helped by the fact that the first series of the show has not been repeated, due to a belief in the BBC that the material was of a topical nature and would therefore not be suitable for transmission so long after the event. He did, however, appear on Smith and Jones' own programme, Alas Smith and Jones, playing an ineffectual panel show host; this character apparently inspired John Morton to create the character of Roy Mallard.

Also in 1979, Langham played Arthur Dent in the first professional stage version of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, directed by Ken Campbell. (He later returned to Hitchhiker's, appearing as Prak in Dirk Maggs' Tertiary Phase radio series in 2004.)

Langham narrated the 1984 radio series The History of Rock with Chris Langham, in which Langham took a comedic (and somewhat fictitious) retrospective at the progression of rock music. On Radio 4, he narrated the series The Rapid Eye Movement, which starred Martin Freeman as Chester Bennington, in whose head the entire series took place. He also appeared in the magazine satire The Sunday Format.

On 14 November 1985 Langham appeared as the narrator/reporter in Roxanne, episode five of the BBC situation comedy Happy Families, written by Ben Elton.

Langham wrote the BBC 1 sitcom Kiss Me Kate, which he also appeared in along with Caroline Quentin and Amanda Holden. In 2003 he played George Orwell in a BBC docudrama entitled George Orwell - A Life In Pictures. He has also recently starred alongside co-writer Paul Whitehouse in Help on BBC2, and in the Armando Iannucci comedy The Thick of It. He is also a regular guest on The Heaven and Earth Show, and has appeared as a panellist on Iannucci's Radio 4 show The Armando Iannucci Charm Offensive.

He told actor Ken Campbell that all one needed to do to have an object named after them was to find something without a name and give their name to it. Some time later Langham announced to Campbell that he had named the stalk on top of Berets the langham, after himself.

This content from Wikipedia is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article Chris Langham