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).
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] 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.