FOR more than a year couples staying in a Whitby holiday cottage had their most intimate moments recorded.

And the man behind the “disgusting and depraved actions” was a Huddersfield man – watching in a bedroom across the road.

Now Jonathan Waugh has been jailed for 12 months for a series of sex crimes.

The owner of the holiday let in Hope Terrace in the popular Yorkshire resort had set up covert recording equipment in the main bedroom of the cottage.

He would then play back the images on his wide-screen TV in a cottage he also owned opposite.

York Crown Court was told how the discovery of the surveillance-type equipment, disguised as an alarm clock, was made by a guest who had gone to bed during the day after becoming ill.

As a result the guest and his wife were reported to have felt violated and their relationship to have suffered as a result of the “disgusting and depraved” actions of the holiday cottage owner.

Before the court was Waugh, a 52-year-old former broadcasting engineer, who had previously pleaded guilty to two charges of voyeurism.

When Waugh, of Huddersfield Road, Shelley, appeared he also asked the court to take into consideration six further offences of installing recording devices in Easter Cottage and six of making recordings.

Richard Gent, prosecuting told how Waugh would check that it was couples who would be using the main bedroom of the cottage before setting up the device, which worked on a motion sensor, and would then meet and greet his guests in person.

A couple and their two children had booked the cottage between November 7 and 11, last year, and everything seemed fine until the husband, a former investigator, was taken ill and retired to bed.

Mr Gent said that the husband noticed something unusual about the alarm clock and examined it to find a memory card installed inside it.

He went straight to the police station with the item and when Waugh was quizzed he made admissions that he had been “addicted” to pornography since his 20s.

He had paid £600 for the equipment which he bought on the internet and had used it to record couples in the room for 13 months between October 2010 and November 2011.

He added that he had updated the equipment, which could record in the dark, with a larger memory card and watched the resulting visual and audio recordings for his own sexual gratification.

Rupert Dodswell, mitigating, said his client was of previous good character and had been very anxious and depressed following the discovery of his offending.

He added that as a result his client had had suicidal thoughts, but had also voluntarily been seeking help and treatment for his problems.

He asked the court not to send Waugh into custody so that he could continue to receive help.

Jailing Waugh for 12 months, Recorder David Bradshaw also ordered that he be placed on the sex offenders register for 10 years and subject for the same period to a Sexual Offences Protection Order.

This will restrict Waugh’s further use of covert recording equipment and his ability to own and run a holiday let, unless the police have notification and access to check it out.