A film crew from TV’s ‘The Gadget Show’ took over the grounds of Weston-super-Mare’s Helicopter Museum yesterday to film an episode of the popular Channel Five programme.

Presenters Gail Porter and Jason Bradbury were put through their paces at the museum performing experiments on two brand new digital cameras to test how they coped under extreme conditions. Among the props and equipment brought on site for the one day shoot was an industrial wind machine, water cannons, a pyrotechnic unit and a 26 tonne hydraulic crane.

“The day’s shoot was split into three segments.” Museum Volunteer and the presenters chaperone for the day, Simon Tolley explained “the first part was to test the cameras in extreme weather. The poor young model who had to demonstrate using the camera was blasted by the wind machine and simultaneously sprayed with torrents of water and foam by the special effects crew. She was absolutely soaked!”

For the second segment of the shoot, presenter Gail Porter was raised on a hydraulic platform, up and above the vast museum hangars to test how the cameras would cope being dropped from a height of over sixty feet.

“Surprisingly both the cameras survived the drop” Simon added “but Gail was frozen up there as the wind was really quite strong.”

For the last test of the day, a pyrotechnic crew was brought in to perform a series of staged explosions on the museums helipad and both cameras were blown up in a final experiment to test how indestructible they really were.

Simon, no stranger to gadgets himself is the organiser of this years Flight Simulator Event that will take place at the Helicopter Museum in May, he added “with all the flames and smoke, the final shoot was really impressive and the explosions should look quite dramatic on TV.”

The episode of ‘The Gadget Show’ filmed at the museum is scheduled to be broadcast in early May.