John Beasley of Intrinsic Solutions describes his part in the Discovery Channel TV show Impossible Heists, broadcast in December.
For one mad week, the filming of Impossible Heists took place at East London’s Three Mills Studios during August. The task was simple ‘to design a bank security system to stop two teams gaining access to the strong room. Next, ensure that the two teams would eventually find a route through and then to ensure that any of the security devices used were not compromised in a way that would-be criminals would learn from. The director needed someone to brief the teams and give them some ‘intelligence’ on the systems they were about to attack. That was not a problem in itself; the worst bit was that they wanted to film it. I explained to the director that I did not think that I would be very photogenic; he did not see this as a problem as he told me, ‘I’m a genius with lighting!’ So what started out as a simple security design turned into my first TV appearance. The timescales for pulling the whole programme together were quite tight and as they explained, pilot shows do not have the budget to enable payments to be made to cover all the expected costs. So armed with this information I set about recruiting an installation company, plus some manufacturers who would be willing to lend equipment for the filming.
