Jem Stansfield

Stansfield has a degree in aeronautics from Bristol University and, before his television career, worked in a Czech school, as a shepherd in the Australian outback, and briefly in stand-up comedy.^[2] Stansfield was an on-screen ballistics expert for the television show Scrapheap Challenge and went on to become a permanent part of the engineering team for subsequent series.^[3][4]

Among his inventions are a compressed-air powered motorcycle, and boots that walk on water (for which he won a New Scientist prize).^[5]

In 2010, Stansfield used vacuum cleaners to create "Spider-Man style" climbing gloves, climbing 30 feet up a brick wall.^[5][6] He also drove a modified 1988 Volkswagen Scirocco 210 miles from London to Manchester using coffee granules for fuel.^[7][8]

In 2013, Stansfield sustained injuries during filming of a segment for the series Bang Goes the Theory. The segment was about the safety of front-facing and rear-facing seats in car crashes. Stansfield was in a cart which crashed, simulating the impact of a car hitting a lamppost and suffered from spine and brain injuries as a result.^[9]

In 2021, Stansfield was awarded £1.6m in damages after a High Court battle.^[9] It emerged in court that the BBC had been warned of the dangers by crash test experts but this information was never passed to Stansfield.^[9]