THE appropriate punishment for a man who seeks out and then views images of children being sexually tortured is, unfortunately, too graphic to be published in a family newspaper. (I'm thinking the old two-bricks treatment here.) But what it definitely isn't, is a pathetic two months in jail.

Chris Langham, the Bafta- award-winning TV actor walked free from jail this week after Appeal Court judges decided his sentence of 10 months, awarded in September, was too harsh a punishment for downloading indecent images of children so they shortened it to four.

Langham says he viewed the images, which included those of the most serious category 5 which can include images of children undergoing rape and sado-masochism, because he was researching a character for a TV programme.

His counsel told the appeal judges he wasn't looking at these pictures for erotic reasons, but, rather, because he was writing about child abuse with admirable motives. He was looking at images to do that better.' So that's all right then.

Langham is an actor. So, the next time he's going to play a murderer will he be going out and doing someone in, just so he can know what it feels like? Will rapists argue that the reason they attack women is so they can try and understand better what a woman goes through when this kind of thing happens?

Let's face it, the Langham judgement will open the floodgates to every piece of lowlife who likes to gloat over child porn to argue that they did it for their art. Because that's basically what Langham is saying. Even though his co-writer, the comic actor Paul Whitehouse, told the original trial that no such research was required for any TV series.

You'd think now this has happened that Langham would be on his knees, weeping with relief wouldn't you? Or better still, sitting at home with a bag over his head. But he's not. He's still snivelling to the press that while his conscience may be clear': "My life is in ruins."

I do hope so but it will never be the sort of ruin experienced by those poor kids, whose distress he helped to prolong when he logged on to watch them being violated, will it?

Thanks to various do-gooders and so-called reformers, we're not allowed to flog perverts now, or to hound them from their houses; we have to rely on the law to scare them off their evil ways. We have to hope that the thought of being found out, going through a trial and going to prison will be so horrible it will encourage the others not to go there.

So after this week we're a bit stuffed, aren't we? For all the fine words, initiatives and waffle that the government and the legal system spouts when the public start getting angry about this kind of thing, we now know that some judges consider the appropriate punishment for a man who downloads child pornography is two months in prison and back home in time for Christmas with his own kids.

It stinks.